In this paper we estimate quadratic food Engel curves with measurement error using the 1994 Ethiopian Urban Household Budget Survey. In sharp contrast to the findings from developed countries, food share is found to increase with expenditure, and only starts to decline after some threshold level of expenditure. We establish the robustness of this inverted-U relationship by estimating a more fle...

Article history: Received 1 October 2013 Received in revised form 1 October 2014 Accepted 5 November 2014 Available online 4 February 2015 This paper investigates the effects of software intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the performance of software firms. For this, technical efficiency scores for Korean software firms are examined, and for an empirical analysis, data envelopment analysis (...

This paper empirically analyzes the influence of proximity to road on HIV-infection using geographical data on road infrastructure and survey data collected by the Demographic and Health Surveys in six African countries. Firstly we show that living in proximity to a major road increases the individual risk of infection and that the observed relationship is sensitive to the use of the road. Seco...

This paper evaluates the hypothesis that during the 2008-2009 collapse in international trade, imports of higher quality goods experienced larger reductions compared to low-quality imports, using data on U.S. imports disaggregated by HS-10 product category and source country. We find little, if any, robust econometric evidence in support of this hypothesis. JEL Classifications: F41, F42

The artistic labor market is marked by several adversities, such as low wages, above-average unemployment, and constrained underemployment. Nevertheless, it attracts many young people. The number of students exceeds the available jobs by far. A potential explanation for this puzzle is that artistic work might result in exceptionally high job satisfaction, a conjecture that has been mentioned at...

The direction of the causality between energy consumption and income is an important issue in the fields of energy economics, economic growth, and policies toward energy use. The seminal work on the relations between energy consumption and aggregate income is Kraft and Kraft (1978). An extensive literature has followed on, including Akarca and Long (1980), Yu and Choi (1985), Erol and Yu (1988)...

The artistic labor market is marked by several adversities, such as low wages, above-average unemployment, and constrained underemployment. Nevertheless, it attracts many young people. The number of students exceeds the available jobs by far. A potential explanation for this puzzle is that artistic work might result in exceptionally high job satisfaction, a conjecture that has been mentioned at...

Everybody Needs Good Neighbours? Evidence from Students’ Outcomes in England We estimate the effect of neighbours’ characteristics and prior achievements on teenage students’ educational and behavioural outcomes using census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England. Our research design is based on changes in neighbourhood composition caused explicitly by residential migra...

Spatial Decentralization and Program Evaluation: Theory and an Example from Indonesia This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are responsive to t...

Instrumental Variable Estimation of Treatment Effects for Duration Outcomes In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in terms of shifting the quanti...