The most commonly used approaches to parametric (stochastic frontier) analysis of efficiency in panel data, notably the fixed and random effects models, fail to distinguish between cross individual heterogeneity and inefficiency. This blending of effects is particularly problematic in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) panel data set on health care delivery, which is a 191 country, five year...

High unemployment continues to bedevil Poland, although the national picture masks striking spatial differences that this paper seeks to explain using a panel data set for the country’s NUTS 4 level powiats. Given the economy’s somewhat peculiar configuration throughout its communist epoch, emphasis is placed on rural-urban differences. Finding a random effects estimator to be most appropriate ...

Physician productivity is an important driver of key healthcare outcomes, such as quality of care, treatment costs and patient satisfaction, because physicians influence a vast majority of treatment decisions, and are central to the care delivery process. Thus, it is critical for researchers to understand how transformation technologies, such as electronic medical records (EMRs) impact physicia...

The goal of this paper is to determine the nature of the causal relationship between "social capital," as measured by household membership in formal and informal groups and household welfare in South Africa. Using a recently collected panel data set in South Africa's largest province, we estimate per capita expenditure functions and find a positive and significant impact of household-level soci...

We propose conditions under which parameters of fixed-effect dynamic models are identified with unequally spaced panel data. Under predeterminedness, weak stationarity, and empirically testable rank conditions, AR(1) parameters are identified given the availability of ‘‘two pairs of two consecutive time gaps’’, which generalizes ‘‘two pairs of two consecutive time periods’’. This result extends...

This paper studies the existence for a set of countries of an inflation threshold above which its effect on economic growth is negative, considering the speed of transition from one inflation regime to the other. Using a panel data set of above 120 countries for the period after the Second World War, we apply a panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model with fixed effects. The estimated th...

One of the stylized facts from the literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms is the existence of a positive exporter productivity premium on average, exporting firms are more productive than firms that sell on the national market only. In this paper, we look at the productivity distribution of both exporting and non-exporting firms in German manufacturing industries. We reco...

Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness... Or Does It? A Reconsideration Based on the Combined Effects of Wealth, Income and Consumption The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships with household income. The paper ...

This paper examines the effects of laws mandating that health insurance cover specific conditions, procedures, providers, and beneficiaries. Unlike previous work, this paper considers the market for employer-based health insurance rather than the much smaller individual market, and uses a panel data approach to account for unobserved heterogeneity among states. Using a fixed effects model, I fi...

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of corruption and poor institutions on trade protection. It exploits data on several measures of trade protection including import duty, international trade taxes, and the trade-GDP ratio. The paper complements the literature on the relationship between corruption and trade reform. It deviates from the previous literature in several ways. First, ...