The Obesity Epidemic in Europe This paper uses longitudinal micro-evidence from the European Community Household Panel to investigate the obesity phenomenon in nine EU countries from 1998 to 2001. The author documents cross-country prevalence, trends and cohort-age profiles of obesity among adults and analyses the socioeconomic factors contributing to the problem. The associated costs of obesit...

Using panel data on micro-enterprises from Peru, we find evidence suggesting that firm dynamics explain ‘formality’, i.e. the decision to participate in societal institutions. In particular, we find that participation increases with firm size and age, implying transition of firms to formality as they grow. The distinct characteristics of sub-groups, segmented according to life-cycle criteria, f...

Mining elite genes within rice landraces is of importance for the improvement of cultivated rice. An association mapping for 12 agronomic traits was carried out using a core collection of rice consisting of 150 landraces (Panel 1) with 274 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, and the mapping results were further verified using a Chinese national rice micro-core collection (Panel 2) and a colle...

Testing the presence of serial correlation in the error terms of a fixed effects regression model is important for many reasons. While there have been a number of testing procedures developed so far (see, e.g., Bhargava, Franzini and Narendranathan (1982), Baltagi and Li (1995), Baltagi and Wu (1999), Bera et al. (2001), Wooldridge (2002), Drukker (2003), Hong and Kao (2004) and Inoue and Solon...

The Link between R&D, Innovation and Productivity: Are Micro Firms Different?* We analyze the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in MSMEs with a special focus on micro firms with fewer than 10 employees; usually constituting the majority of firms in industrialized economies. Using the German KfW SME panel, we examine to what extent micro firms are different from other firms in terms...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of long-and medium-term duration in micro…nance program participation, and also the short-, mediumand long-run impacts of micro…nance. It utilises a new, large and unique household-level panel dataset collected on 1997/98 treatment and contro households, spanning about 8 years. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the ...