Gender Differences in Sickness Absence and the Gender Division of Family Responsibilities This study investigates possible reasons for the gender difference in sickness absence. We estimate both shortand long-term effects of parenthood in a within-couple analysis based on the timing of parenthood. We find that after entering parenthood, women increase their sickness absence by between 0.5 days ...

This paper analyses price elasticities in the Austrian market for mobile telecommunications services using data on firm specific tariffs in the period between January 1998 and March 2002. Dynamic panel data regressions are used to estimate short-run and long-run demand elasticities for business customers and for private consumers with both postpaid contracts and prepaid cards. We find that busi...

We analyze price adjustments in the housing market after an exogenous shock. Exploring continuous-time records of prices around a major European airport (ZRH, Switzerland), and an unexpected change in flight regulations induced by the neighboring country Germany, we find that apartment rents take about two years to stabilize to a new equilibrium value. After this period we find a constant marku...

This paper presents some two-step estimators for a wide range of parametric panel data models with censored endogenous variables and sample selection bias. Our approach is to derive estimates of the unobserved heterogeneity responsible for the endogeneity/selection bias to include as additional explanatory variables in the primary equation. These are obtained through a decomposition of the redu...

Workplaces in the Primary Economy and Wage Pressure in the Secondary Labor Market This paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model in which firms in the primary economy have to create workplaces prior to production and product market competition. For this, we introduce the endogenous sunk cost approach with two-stage decisions of firms from IO in the macro-labor literature. By hypothe...

This paper demonstrates how parsimonious models of sinusoidal functions can be used to fit spatially variant time series in which there is considerable variation of a periodic type. A typical shortcoming of such tools relates to the difficulty in capturing idiosyncratic variation in periodic models. The strategy developed here addresses this deficiency. While previous work has sought to overcom...

I analyze the effect of inequality on growth over different time-frames. In a large cross-country dataset for the period 1950-2007 I find evidence of a short-run (5-year periods) and medium-run (10-year periods) inverse-U relationship between inequality and growth. In the long-run (20-year periods), however, inequality has a negative effect on growth in poor countries, and a positive effect in ...

The paper evaluates the effect of the FAMEX export promotion program in Tunisia on the export performance of beneficiary firms using firm-level data. Propensity-score matching difference-indifference and weighted least squares estimates suggest that beneficiaries expand at the intensive and the extensive margin (markets and products). However, this expansion is short-lived for total exports. Ou...

Several empirical studies are concerned with measuring the effect of currency and current account crises on economic growth. Using different empirical models this paper serves two aspects. It provides an explicit assessment of country specific factors influencing the costs of crises in terms of economic growth and controls via a treatment type model for possible sample selection governing the o...

Traditional empirical strategies for studying convergence—more generally, the dynamics and determinants of economic growth—can be misleading if important, underlying permanent or growth components are stochastically time-varying. This paper documents the degree to which this instability characterizes the data, and then offers an alternative empirical framework. This alternative—directly modelli...