Recent evaluations of the impact of Turkish healthcare reforms on the efficiency of public hospitals suffer from simultaneous structural changes in the healthcare sector as well as from lack of data on some of the key ingredients of the reform. In this note, we analyze the major obstacles in a fair evaluation of the efficiency of public hospitals taking Sulku(2011)’s data envelopment analysis a...

This paper proposes a new unit root test in the context of a random autoregressive coefficient panel data model, in which the null of a unit root corresponds to the joint restriction that the autoregressive coefficient has unit mean and zero variance. The asymptotic distribution of the test statistic is derived and simulation results are provided to suggest that it performs very well in small s...

This paper uses Granger non–causality tests to analyze if channel competition exists between the companion websites of 93 German newspapers observed between I/1998 and II/2005. It provides econometric evidence for significant negative effects of companion website traffic on the print circulation of national newspapers and for significantly positive effects on local newspapers, at least for the ...

Separating Uncertainty from Heterogeneity in Life Cycle Earnings This paper develops and applies a method for decomposing cross section variability of earnings into components that are forecastable at the time students decide to go to college (heterogeneity) and components that are unforecastable. About 60% of variability in returns to schooling is forecastable. This has important implications ...

This study presents an empirical analysis of the cost efficiency of a sample of Swiss multi-utilities operating in the distribution of electricity, natural gas and water. The multi-utilities that operate in different sectors are characterized by a strong unobserved heterogeneity. Therefore the measurement of their performance poses an important challenge for the regulators. The purpose of this ...

Macro-prudential authorities need to assess medium-term downside risks the real economy, caused by severe financial shocks. Before activating policy measures, they also consider their short-term negative impact. This gives rise a risk management problem, an inter-temporal trade-off between expected growth and risk. Predictive distributions are estimated with structural quantile vector autoregre...

this study investigates the relationship between market structure and profitability in the iranian manufacturing industries. in this study, raw data based on international standard industrial classification (at four digit code) has been used. fixed effects panel estimation method (based on diagnostic test results) has been chosen for empirical investigation. the result of the study confirms the...

This paper examines the impact of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy announcements, of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee on UK sectoral stock returns. The monetary policy shock is generated from the change in the three-month sterling LIBOR futures contract. Using a panel GMM estimator we find that both the expected and unexpected components of monetary changes are signi...

Labor and product market regulations affect the unemployment rate of a country without doubt. Econometricians, however, have yet to establish an unequivocal significance of this impact. Model mis-specification, one of the main underlying problems, is overcome by adopting a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. I apply this method to a panel data set that covers 17 OECD countries for the time perio...