The paper analyzes the effect of incentives regulation, when the yardstick competition approach is supplemented with a performance tax on providers. In an application to prospective payments in health care in the U.S. and Japan, we show differential effects of value-based purchasing, when price-setting is related to benchmark values of quality measures or length-of-stay. The predictions of our ...

Work or Retirement? Exit Routes for Norwegian Elderly ∗ In this paper we analyse early retirement pathways for Norwegian male and female workers. We apply a multinomial logit model to a data set covering more than 10 500 employees, ages 56-61, in 1989. The aim is to analyse the transition to different destinations, i.e. disability pension, unemployment benefits, out of the labour force, in the ...

This paper analyses market efficiency and the role of the virtual location in digital markets using a data set containing more than 23,000 price observations from the online market for contact lenses as well as detailed information about online retailer and product characteristics. The data allow to implement and test the concept of virtual location. The empirical results reveal evidence for lo...

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. In order to estimate the effect of conflict on self-employment, we employ fixed effects estimation. T...

We analyze a time series of global temperature anomaly distributions to identify and estimate persistent features in climate change. In our study, temperature densities, obtained from globally distributed data over the period from 1850 to 2012, are regarded as a time series of functional observations that are changing over time. We employ a formal test for the existence of functional unit roots...

Bertschek and Lechner (1998) propose several variants of a GMM estimator based on the period specific regression functions for the panel probit model. The analysis is motivated by the complexity of maximum likelihood estimation and the possibly excessive amount of time involved in maximum simulated likelihood estimation. But, for applications of the size considered in their study, full likeliho...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850 regions in 91 aid recipient countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2005, we compare the eff...

This paper presents a comparison of power of panel tests of cointegration and show how the choice of most powerful test depends on the values of the sample statistics. Country-by-country and panel stationarity and cointegration tests are performed using a panel of 20 OECD countries observed over the period 1971-2004. Residual-based tests and a cointegration rank test in the system of health car...

In the context of China without a median voter system, this study examines whether the “flypaper effect”, an unconditional lump-sum grant from the upper governments to the county governments increases spending in a greater proportion than an equivalent rise in local income, holds true in China. Using China’s county-level education data during 2007, the models have been estimated using a spatial...

We propose a nonlinear heterogeneous panel unit root test for testing the null hypothesis of unit-root processes against the alternative that allows a proportion of units to be generated by globally stationary ESTAR processes and a remaining non-zero proportion to be generated by unit root processes. The proposed test is simple to apply and accommodates cross section dependence. Monte Carlo sim...