Microfinance supports mainly informal activities that often have a low return and low market demand. It may therefore be hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of microfinance is modest or even nonexistent. If true, the poverty impact of microfinance observed at the participant level represents either income redistribution or short-run income generation from the microfinance interventio...

The 11th Pacific-Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference (PAKDD 2007) hosted a data mining competition, co-organized by the Singapore Institute of Statistics. The data set is from a consumer finance company with the aim of finding solutions for a cross-selling business problem. The company currently has two databases, one for credit card holders and the other for home loan (mortgage...

This paper explores the relationship between special-interest groups and volatility of GDP growth. In an unbalanced panel of 108 countries, we find a significant negative relationship between the number of interest groups in a country and the volatility of GDP growth. Citation: Coates, Dennis, Jac Heckelman, and Bonnie Wilson, (2007) "Special-Interest Groups and Volatility." Economics Bulletin,...

Using panel data from Spain Farinas and Ruano (IJIO 2005) test three hypotheses from a model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that exit in year t were in t-1 less productive than firms that continue to produce in t. (H2) Firms that enter in year t are less productive than incumbent firms in year t. (H3) Surviving firms from an entry cohort were more productive than non-surviving fir...

Entrepreneurship capital refers to the factors of a region that drives new businesses (Audretsch and Keilbach, 2004). This study considers industry growth and performance in manufacturing, retail and service as components of entrepreneurship capital to drive the long-term growth of new establishments. Using a panel data of 2,940 counties from 2002–2007, our results support the notion that the o...

This paper investigates empirically the main determinants of firm competitiveness under conditions of economic turmoil, with the use of panel data techniques. The study is based on firm-level financial data of 693 firms from the high and medium technology manufacturing sectors in Greece, and covers the time period 1996-2011, distinguishing between the pre-crisis (1996-2007) and the post-crisis ...

Do reported reservation wages correspond to the concept of reservation wages that economists have? Using panel data on British unemployed I calculate reservation wages from a search model and compare these with reported reservation wages. It is shown that men’s reported reservation wages are greater than what the model predicts, and that for women there is hardly a relation between the two vari...