Innovation and technological change are central to the quest for regional development. In the globally-connected knowledge-driven economy, the relevance of agglomeration forces that rely on proximity continues to increase, paradoxically despite declining real costs of information, communication and transportation. Globally, the proportion of the population living in cities continues to grow and...

The Impact of Participation in Sports on Educational Attainment: New Evidence from Germany We analyze the impact of exercising sports during childhood and adolescence on educational attainment. The theoretical framework is based on models of allocation of time and educational productivity. Using the rich information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we apply generalized ordered prob...

This research surveyed over 784 Chinese consumers in Shanghai and Nanjing in 2001 and 2002, evaluating their preferences for livestock product attributes using ordered-probit models and factor analyses. Empirical results confirm the heterogeneity of Chinese livestock retail markets and suggest that livestock distributors should focus on Chinese female consumers and young consumers considering c...

This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinants of satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human development and culture. We use ordered probit to investigate the importance of these variables on individual li...

In this paper we examine how the weather determines the quality of wines produced in the Barolo and Barbaresco regions of Italy. Since pricing data are not widely available for these wines, we measure wine vintage quality by a variety of subjective measures of quality taken from the published opinions of several experts. Since these measures of quality are only ordinal, we estimate their determ...

In this paper we examine the effect of innovation on job creation and job destruction in Spanish manufacturing. Our empirical analysis is based on firm-level longitudinal data from which we have information on employment and innovation activity. The estimation approach consists of a two-step procedure that takes into account the fact that firms endogenously choose positive, negative or zero gro...

This paper uses a heteroscedastic ordered probit model to distinguish the effects of vehicle weight, footprint and height on the severity of injuries sustained by vehicle occupants while controlling for many occupant, roadway and other characteristics. Model results suggest that the impacts of physical vehicle attributes on crash outcomes depend on the number of involved vehicles, and typically...

This study investigates the relationship between occupant injury and a host of other factors, including traffic and weather conditions present at the time of crash, road design, vehicle type, and occupant characteristics. Crash and traffic-detector data from six Orange County freeways were used in an ordered probit model. Crash outcomes were classified for each occupant, as no injury, non-visib...

Increasing evidence from the empirical economic and psychological literature suggests that positive and negative well-being are more than opposite ends of the same phenomenon. Two separate measures of the dependent variable may be needed when analyzing the determinants of subjective well-being. We argue that this conclusion reflects in part the use of too restrictive econometric models. A flexi...

Ordered discrete dependent variable models such as ordered probit and ordered logit are frequently used across the social sciences to study outcomes including health status, happiness, wealth and educational attainment. Unlike in the case of OLS, unaccounted for heteroskedasticity in these models can lead to biased parameter estimates. This paper introduces the oglmx package for the R statistic...