The author presents new evidence on the effects of attendance on academic performance. He used a large panel data set for introductory microeconomics students to explicitly take into account the effect of unobservable factors correlated with attendance, such as ability, effort, and motivation. He found that neither proxy variables nor instrumental variables provide a solution to the omitted var...

The paper explains IMF and World Bank lending and conditionality stressing changes in relative bargaining power of different stakeholders over time. It applies public choice theory to explain the interests of the institutions’ member states, its borrowers and staffs as well as private actors attaching their money to the IFIs’ programs. Using panel data for 43 countries between 1987–99 it is sho...

W examine how initial public offerings (IPOs) and acquisitions affect entrepreneurial innovation as measured by patent counts and forward patent citations. We construct a firm-year panel data set of all venture capital-backed biotechnology firms founded between 1980 and 2000, tracked yearly through 2006. We address the possibility of unobserved self-selection into exit mode by using coarsened e...

We develop a structural consumer lifecycle model to investigate consumers’ adoption and usage decisions of ATM cards in Italy. By estimating a model of consumers’ optimal usage decisions and embedding it into a forward-looking consumer adoption decision model, we can “impute” per period monetary benefits of adopting the financial innovation. This in turn allows us to recover the monetary value ...

Improved governance and lower start-up costs may not be sufficient for encouraging the type of entrepreneurship that matters for economic growth. Using panel data on 60 countries spanning the period 2003-07 this paper establishes that (i) opportunitymotivated entrepreneurship (as opposed to necessity-motivated entrepreneurship) drives economic growth; (ii) governance and the start-up costs are ...

Liquidity constraints are an almost ubiquitous assumption in development economics. Yet the direct evidence for liquidity constraints is limited, and many observations consistent with liquidity constraints are equally compatible with precautionary saving or a lack of forward planning. Using household panel data and a source of widely anticipated income in South Africa, this paper tests and reje...

The imposed commission ban to Finnish insurance intermediaries has generated some controversy and the intermediary market has experienced consolidation in the few last years. The thesis examines the relationship between market structure and profitability among Finnish life insurance intermediaries and tests for the applicability of two market power hypotheses. The panel data analysis shows that...

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Firms invest in a variety of information technologies and seek to align their IT asset portfolios with two key performance outcomes: efficiency and innovation. Existing research makes the universalistic assumption that both outcomes will always be realized through firms’ IT asset portfolios. There has been limited research on the conditions under which firms’ IT asset portfolios should be orien...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Total quality management Performance Institutional theory Systemic approach This study explores the relationship between total quality management (TQM) and firm performance taking TQM as an internally consistent system of practices. The study tests the link between the two variables using the universal approach, analyzes whether the most competitive firms are tho...