â â â  â â  abstract â  the importance of community's health followed by the consideration of endogenous growth models has led to an increase in health expenditure of countries to speed up economic growth and development. this has made the efficiency of health production function to an essential issue especially in developing countries. based upon this, the present study with employing the...

Article history: Received 21 August 2013 Accepted 15 November 2013 Available online 19 December 2013 Capital adequacy plays an important role in determining banking activities. A bank must hold a minimum level of capital to ensure sufficient funds to buffer against unexpected losses or adverse shocks. This study analyzes and compares Islamic and conventional banks in 14 Organization of Islamic ...

In this paper we explore the application of structured additive distributional regression for the analysis of conditional income distributions in Germany following the reunification. Using a bootstrapped Kolmogorov-Smirnov test we find that conditional personal income distributions can generally be modelled using the three parameter Dagum distribution. Additionally our results hint at an even m...

We show that the quantile regression estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal when the error terms are correlated within clusters but independent across clusters. A consistent estimator of the covariance matrix of the asymptotic distribution is provided and we propose a specification test capable of detecting the presence of intra-cluster correlation. A small simulation study illustrat...

This paper establishes improved uniform convergence rates for series estimators. Series estimators are least-squares fits of a regression function where the number of regressors depends on sample size. I will specialize my results to the cases of polynomials and regression splines. These results improve upon results obtained earlier by Newey, yet fail to attain the optimal rates of convergence....

This note describes methods to test for distributional treatment effects under the conditional independence assumption. The differences between latent outcome distributions are judged by testing hypotheses of distributional equality and stochastic dominance. Furthermore, semiparametric efficient versions of the test statistics are given. The latter test statistics are double robust, i.e., they ...

The Sukuk market has become the fastest growing segment of the Islamic financial services industry. Governments and other corporate entities have started tapping the local and international Sukuk markets in order to raise the required funds. The investor base is also expanding and Sukuk has now become a popular and obvious choice for retail investors in a number of jurisdictions. However, becau...

This research analyses through the use of instrumental variables estimation whether democracy has an effect on variables belonging to three different categories: fiscal policy, inequality in income distribution and political instability. It shows there is no stable relation between democracy and fiscal policy variables between countries of the sample in the 1978-1988 period. Democracy, on the o...

Height and Cognitive Function among Older Europeans: Do People from “Tall” Countries Have Superior Cognitive Abilities? Previous research has found that height is correlated with cognitive functioning at older ages. It therefore makes sense to ask a related question: do people from countries where the average person is relatively tall have superior cognitive abilities on average? Using data fro...

The paper explores firstly the impact of technological change on trade growth at the country level, using trade statistics and statistics on patenting activity in the US, across 20 countries for 17 manufacturing sectors. Secondly, using structural decomposition analysis, the paper examines statistically, whether the degree to which countries get access to sectors with above average growth in te...