Almas Heshmati

University of Delaware | UDel UD · Department of Applied Economics and Statistics

This study compares an ideal model of a sustainable research institution and the dominating model used by Sida. It uses a complementary capacity building (CCB) model aimed to promote an improved research culture for strengthening the sustainability of research partnerships in economics and management disciplines. This study uses bibliometric data t...

This paper studies urbanization in China using composite indices of urban infrastructure. It has two objectives. First, it computes a multidimensional composite index of urban infrastructure for ranking 31 provinces and six regions in China by their level of urbanization and infrastructure development during the period 2005–2014. The infrastructure...

This paper models and estimates total factor productivity (TFP) growth parametrically. The model is a generalization of the traditional production function model where technology is represented by a time trend. It decomposes TFP growth into an unobservable time trend induced technical change, scale economies and an observable technology shifter ind...

This study analyzes the relationship between air pollutants (represented as the air quality index or AQI) and healthcare expenditure. It uses balanced monthly panel data that provides information about the healthcare expenditure, concentration of air pollutants, and regional characteristics. It considers all the variables for 16 cities and province...

This study analyses the technical efficiency of Iran's 13 major cotton producing provinces over the period 2000-12. It uses two non-parametric full frontier models (Data Envelopment Analysis and Free Disposal Hull) and two partial frontier models (Order-α and Order-m with different values for α and m) to assess the technical efficiency of these cot...

This study examines the extent of poverty in different provinces and districts in Rwanda using both consumption and income per capita. It also looks at the determinants of household poverty and focuses on four categories for studying the determinants of poverty in the country. The income-based study of poverty is based on information from the house...

The well-being of families and their children is given high priority in development goals. Children’s well-being in Africa is important since the growing number of children is the greatest resource of this continent. Rwanda was one of the first countries that ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The country, despite its very low GDP...

This volume is a collection of studies on poverty and well-being, vulnerability to poverty, women’s empowerment and smallholders’ efficiency in selected African countries. It has a collection of 12 empirical studies that have an overall focus on poverty, well-being and vulnerability to poverty and includes contributions by 19 authors. The studies a...

This paper studies urbanization in China using composite indices of urban infrastructure. It has two objectives. First, it computes a multidimensional composite index of urban infrastructure for ranking 31 provinces and six regions in China by their level of urbanization and infrastructure development during the period 2005–2014. The infrastructure...

In multiple standard OLS regression models, we test the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the ‘four freedoms’ of goods, capital, labour and services, on the following indicators of sustainable development: avoiding net trade of ecological footprint gha per person, Carbon emissions per million US dollars GDP, CO2 per capita, Envi...

A major policy challenge facing African countries is how to achieve and sustain a higher rate of economic growth that will help them reduce poverty while also being both socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable (Acemoglu 2009; Barro 1997; Barro and Sala-i-Martin 2004; Heshmati et al. 2015; Kim and Heshmati 2014).

Labour productivity reflects a firm’s ability to generate higher production or value-added. This paper analyses labour productivity and its determinants in the manufacturing and service sectors in Kenya. As the largest economy in East Africa, it is crucial for Kenya to have high labour productivity as it has strong implications for economic growth...

This volume is a collection of selected empirical studies on determinants of economic growth in Africa. Grouped into three parts, chapters examine the influence of financial sources and economic growth; sources of productivity growth; and prices, exchange rates and trade relationships with growth in regions in Africa or the continent as a whole. Th...

Rapid economic growth in many sub-Saharan African countries and the consolidation of the lower education sector implies that it is becoming increasingly important to meet the demand for higher education institutions. The expansion of existing national research institutions is facing challenges related to a shortage of faculties with up-to-date skil...

Following the attempt by Alesina and Guiliano (2013) to measure global culture and to project these measurements onto real choropleth geographical world maps, we utilize the data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to arrive at robust measurement scales of global economic, political and social values and to assess Turkey’s place within them. Our stu...

Introduction of Human Development Index (HDI) by UNDP in early 1990 followed a surge in use of non-parametric and parametric indices for measurement and comparison of countries performance in development, globalization, competition, well-being and etc. The HDI is a composite index of three indicators. Its components are to reflect three major dimen...

The literature show evidence that small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) are understood as main source of technology development and employment creation. At the same time they are vulnerable to a number of restrictions such as access to finances, skilled labor and public support, while are exposed to high competition and suffer from low survival ra...

http://www.iraneconomics.org/conferences.htm

Ever since Goldin (1995) proposed the idea that there is a U-shaped female labor force participation rate function in economic development, empirical research is stunned by the question why the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are characterized by such low rates of female labor force participation. This gap in labor economics re...

A sustained rapid economic growth to reduce multidimensional poverty is a policy challenge facing developing Asia and the globe. This book is a joint effort to analyze poverty reduction in Asia. The focus is on drivers, best practices, and policy initiatives. This introductory chapter presents the background to the project and summarizes the contri...

This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to model heterogeneous performances across power plants and ov...

Following the attempt by Alesina and Guiliano (2013) to measure global culture and to project these measurements onto real choropleth geographical world maps, we utilize the data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to arrive at robust measurement scales of global economic, political and social values and to assess Turkey’s place on them. Our study,...

This study measures productivity growth using the Metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger productivity growth index (MML index) method and decomposes the index. The results are compared with those obtained from the conventional Malmquist-Luenberger (ML) productivity growth index. MML has two advantages compared with the ML index. The former is able to co...

This paper presents the parametric estimation of the rates of technical change and total factor productivity (TFP) growth of 7,462 Korean manufacturing firms for the period 1987 to 2007. Two alternative formulations of technical change measured by the time trend and the general index approaches are estimated with panel data models assuming flexible...

e Bien que la sociologie française ait longuement débattu de la question de la mondialisation, il est surprenant de constater que, jusqu'à ce jour, et peut­être à toutes fins utiles, elle ait négligé d'examiner la tentative internationale la plus cohérente visant à mesurer, quantitativement, et à étudier les effets de la pénétration du capital tran...

With the growing environmental crisis affecting our globe, ideas to weigh economic or social progress by the ‘energy input’ necessary to achieve it are increasingly gaining acceptance. This question is intriguing and is being dealt with by a growing number of studies, focusing on the environmental price of human progress. Even more intriguing, howe...

This study specifies and estimates a model to investigate the relationship between different phases of the electricity industry and market. These include the generation, transmission, distribution and demand segments. Common variables that explain these segments are identified and their effects estimated. Korean time series data from the period 196...

Globalization, the Human Condition and Sustainable Development in the Twenty-first Century: Cross-national Perspectives and European Implications’ is a cross-national, 175-nation-based exploration of the deep crisis in which Europe currently finds itself. Investigating the effects of dependency theory and world-systems theory upon the global succes...

The increasing use of demand-side management as a tool to reliably meet electricity demand at peak time has stimulated interest among researchers, consumers and producer organizations, managers, regulators and policymakers, This research reviews the growing literature on models used to study demand, consumer baseline (CBL) and demand response in th...

In this article, we present a first empirical reflection on 'smart development,' its measurement, possible 'drivers' and 'bottlenecks.' We first provide cross-national data on how much ecological footprint is used in the nations of the world system to 'deliver' a given amount of democracy, economic growth, gender equality, human development, resear...

In the neoclassical production functions model technical change (TC) is assumed to be exogenous and it is specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect the rate of TC. In this paper we model TC via a combination of time trend (purely non-economic) and other observable exogenous factors, wh...

This study analyzes the relationship between R&D investment and the productivity of Korean R&D-engaged firms. An interdependent chain of equations including the propensity to invest, R&D investment and productivity are estimated in a multi-step procedure accounting for selectivity and simultaneity biases. Using Korean firm level panel data of liste...

Internet accessibility is positively correlated with infrastructure development and nature of government policies. Though Iraq has shown considerable increase in Internet connectivity, it constitutes only 10 % of its population. In this study, the significant factors determining the use and non-use of Internet have been identified and analyzed. The...

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as other exogenous (external economic) factors (technology...

This study proposes an index for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth which appropriately considers the nature of technical change. The rationale of this methodology is to exclude a spurious technical regress from the macroeconomic perspective. In order to incorporate this in developing the index, a directional distance function...

Since the financial crisis in Korea, by focusing on core technology, IT startups have played an important role in the recovery of Korea’s economy through innovating technologies and creating new jobs. Even though there are many startups, it is not very common to reach the point of the initial public offering (IPO) and the post-IPO performance of th...

The current paper investigates the cross-national relevance of Latin American 'dependencia theory' for five dimensions of development (democracy and human rights, environment, human development and basic human needs satisfaction, gender justice, redistribution, growth and employment) on a global scale and tries to confront the very basic pro-global...

The current paper investigates the cross-national relevance of Latin American dependencia theory for five dimensions of development (democracy and human rights, environment, human development and basic human needs satisfaction, gender justice, redistribution, growth and employment) on a global scale. It tries to confront the very basic pro-globalis...

A comparative analysis on Korean manufacturing plants is performed by size of plants and sources of TFP growth are decomposed into entry, exit, and survival effects of plants, focusing on the pre- and post-crisis periods. Additional survival analyses investigate internal and external determinants of the survival of plants. The results indicate that...

In this article, we evaluate the effect of the credit guarantee policy by comparing a large sample of guaranteed firms and matched non-guaranteed firms from 2000 to 2003. The sample firms are compared with respect to growth rates of different performance indicators including: productivity, sales, employment, investment, R&D, wage level, and the sur...

Productivity growth is a keyword for sustainable economic growth in a knowledge-based society. There has been significant methodological development in the literature on productivity and efficiency analysis, e.g. SFA (Stochastic Frontier Analysis) and DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis). All these methodological developments should be matched with appl...

Nature based tourism is the fastest growing tourism in many parts of the world. The attitude towards conservation of nature is measured by individuals��willingness to pay. This study has made an attempt to investigate the determinants of tourists��willingness to pay (WTP) for biodiversity conservation. The determinants include a combination of soci...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

Regional economic growth in Portugal has mainly been studied from the perspective of convergence with data ending by the early 2000’s. The country as a whole has stopped converging to the output levels of the richest European countries by this period and has also become one of the most unequal EU member-states in terms of income distribution in the...

In this study, we intend to examine the information and communication technology (ICT) firms from a financial perspective. The relationship between capital structure and cost of capital (COC) is investigated in a simultaneous equation framework. On the one hand, we relate international diversification to the firm's capital structure, and on the oth...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree to which the realized allocation approaches the sociall...

In this study, parametric and non-parametric methods are employed to measure the total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the Korean manufacturing industry from 1993 to 2003. The analysis period contains both periods before and after the Asian financial crisis. The TFP growth rate is decomposed into different components. Also different elasticitie...

Starting from the recent UNICEF publications on child poverty in the developed countries, which received a wide audience in the political and scientific world, in this paper we further analyze the UNICEF study data base and present three composite indices that are multidimensional and quantitative measures of child well-being. While the original UN...

Since the early 1990s, the employment structure of organized manufacturing industries in India has undergone substantial changes with steep rise in the use of contract workers in place of permanent workers. This process has led to increased wage inequality, discrimination as well as concern of job insecurity in the labor market. The paper focuses o...

Starting from Professor Kornai’s assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-term perspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performance of the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. We present in a simple form the mathematical methods used in this essay. Then, we a...

This study evaluates the effect of credit guarantee on SMEs at the firm level. To estimate the effect of credit guarantee, we analyze relations between credit guarantee, the survival of guaranteed firms, and their productive performance. The result indicates that credit guarantee frequency enabled guaranteed firms to achieve good performances in ge...

Globalization1 has become the way to describe changes in international economy and in world politics. Economists define it as the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital across borders. Globalization is the result of reduced transportation and communication costs, lower trade barriers, faster communication, rising capital flows, increa...

In this study, we intend to examine the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firms, from a financial perspective. The causal relationship between capital structure and cost of capital is investigated in a simultaneous equation framework. On the one hand, we relate international diversification to the firm’s capital structure, and on the o...

The Korean economy severely suffered from the Asian financial crisis, and is well known for rapid recovery in the years following. However, the recovery was mainly due to successful restructuring by a limited number of large-sized enterprises (LSEs). The small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are still suffering from the depression. The crisis a...

A product is called technically inefficient when it has higher price and/or lower quality than others. Technical inefficiency of product has been conceptualized since Lancaster (1966), and empirically measured by many researchers, for example, Fernandez-Castro and Smith (2002) and Lee et al. (2005) among others. If we know further the information a...

We examine sensitivity of the estimated relationship between innovation and firm performance. In doing so, we rely on a knowledge production function approach and carry out comparisons in a number of ways. The sensitivity analysis is based on the comparison of a basic econometric model estimated assuming different error structure and using the same...

In this paper, we develop a model of dynamic capital structure choice based on a sample of Korean manufacturing firms and estimate the unobservable optimal capital structure using a wide range of observable determinants. Unbalanced panel data of Korean listed firms for the period 1985-2002 is used. In addition to identifying and estimating the effe...

There is a general agreement about the positive impacts of R&D on the performance of firms, measured as productivity, profitability and growth. However, the opposite relationship is less obvious and very little attention has been paid to examine the feedback from performance on R&D investment. This study contributes to the empirical analysis of a t...

In this study, we intend to examine the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firms, from a financial perspective. On the one hand, we relate international diversification to the firm's capital structure, and on the other, we test their individual and collective inferences on the combined debt and equity cost of capital. Even though ICT co...

This paper investigates the simultaneous causal relationship between investments in information and communication technology (ICT) and flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), with reference to its implications on economic growth. For the empirical analysis we use data from 23 major countries with heterogeneous economic development for the period...

We provide a simple model to investigate decisions on vertical integration/separation. The key feature of this model is that more than one input is required for the final products of the local downstream monopolists. Depending on their cost structure, downstream firms' decisions on vertical separation can be both strategic complements and strategic...

This study addresses the measurement of two composite Lisbon strategy indices that quantifies the level and patterns of development for ranking countries. The first index is nonparametric labelled as Lisbon strategy index (LSI). It is composed of six components: general economics, employment, innovation research, economic reform, social cohesion an...

We examine the dynamic evolution of incomes, both disposable and gross, for several groups in the PSID panel data at several points from 1968 to 1997. We employ the extended Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests of First and Second Order Stochastic Dominance (SD) as implemented by Maasoumi and Heshmati (2000). They do not impose the Least Favorable Case (LFC) o...

This study provides an empirical investigation of the adjustment process of labour in Indian manufacturing industries, which evolved through structural transformation in the era of globalization. The analysis is based on a dynamic model applied to a panel of 22 two-digit manufacturing industries for the time period of 22 years covering 1980/1981 to...

The process of globalization is an international economic order which has led to the progressive integration of the world economy through the pulling the barrier of trade and greater mobility of factors of production. In addition the technological innovation also provides impetus to the progressive integration of the nations. The elements of global...

In the past decade, the European agricultural sector has undergone rapid structural change. Part of that change is manifested in extended early retirement plans. As pensions play a crucial role in determining the characteristics the change, it is important to establish the factors determining the exit from farming among elderly farmers. This study...

A broad definition of innovation input is used, in which R&D is one of several sources of innovation. A quantitative innovation output measure is used in the analysis, which is based on a large representative sample of firms, including small firms. An econometric framework based on the knowledge-production function accounting for both selectivity a...

This paper is an empirical analysis of knowledge capital and performance heterogeneity at the firm level. We apply new econometric methods to extensive data on innovation and innovative activities in Swedish manufacturing. A number of interesting results emerge. First, the results show that knowledge capital, defined as the ratio of innovation sale...

The availability of new internationally-harmonized innovation survey data collected from OECD countries has created some interesting opportunities for studying the following two key areas: (1) the determinants of innovation behavior at firm level, and (2) innovation as an important factor contributing to the economic growth. This paper looks at the...

Capital structure studies have generally been aimed at studying the determinants of optimal leverage. Empirically, the focus is, however, on studying the association between observed leverage and a set of explanatory variables. This approach has a number of shortcomings. First, the observed leverage deviates from the optimal leverage. Second, the e...

This paper examines conditional convergence of OECD countries in gross domestic product (GDP) and health care expenditure (HCE) per capita. It presents estimation of the augmented Solow growth model suggested by Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) to explain variation in output and expenditure per capita across countries. The variation is due to differen...

This paper deals with a dynamic adjustment process in which adjustment of a key variable input (labor) towards its desired level is modeled in a panel data context. The partial adjustment type model is extended to incorporate firm- and time-specific adjustment parameter. A flexible (translog) labor requirement function is used to represent the desi...

The relationships between firms' size, age and their growth rate are examined for a large sample of micro and small firms in Sweden. These firms have employees numbering in the range of 1-100 and are operating in a geographically concentrated area. Micro and small firms dominate the industrial structure and thus their growth patterns are crucial to...

This paper investigates the time-path of efficiency and productivity change in the case of the Romanian cement industry 1966-1989. The analysis is based on different specifications of stochastic frontier models. The efficiency scores and the time paths of efficiency and technical change are found to vary substantially among models. The most importa...

This paper deals with modeling total factor productivity (TFP) growth in a flexible manner using panel data. Several competing parametric models are used to explore whether there are any similarities in the estimates of TFP growth and technical change among these models. Using a primal approach, we decompose TFP growth into different components. Th...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the deregulation of the Swedish banking industry in the mid-1980s, and the consequent banking crisis, on productive efficiency and productivity growth in the industry. An unbalanced panel of Swedish banks is studied over the period, 1984 to 1995. A total of 1275 observations are analysed for 156...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of employment relationship and employment efficiency under production risk using a panel of Zimbabwe¡¯s manufacturing industries. A flexible labour demand function is used consisting of two parts: the traditional labour demand function and labour demand variance function. Labour demand is a function of wa...

This paper presents a dynamic adjustment model of employment. The model is applied to a panel of ten Zimbabwean manufacturing industries observed over the period 1970-1993. The adjustment process is industry and time specific. The adjustment parameter is specified in terms of factors affecting the speed of adjustment. Industries are assumed to adju...

Sweden's income distribution for the whole population and for subgroups, including its immigrants, has been extensively studied. The interest in this area has grown with increasing availability of data, including panels. The previous studies are based on indices of inequality or mobility. While indices are useful for complete ordering and have an a...

In recent years several models have been proposed to estimate time-varying technical efficiency. These models differ to a great extent in specification and estimation. This paper undertakes a comparison between different specifications proposed in earlier research. The models are used to estimate the technical efficiency of 15 Colombian cement plan...

This study considers measurement of the efficiency of 286 Swedish municipalities in the provision of primary‐ and secondary‐school education during 1993/94. Stochastic frontier production is used for this purpose. Both production‐ and cost‐function models are estimated using maximum‐likelihood methods to estimate parameters of the models and to pre...

This paper deals with the estimation of technical efficiency using pseudo panel data constructed from rotating panel data on Swedish crop farmers where each unit is observed for a maximum of four years. Farms are grouped into 89 cohorts, using their common time-invariant characteristics, and the cohorts are used as an individual unit in the empiric...

The nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) model has become increasingly popular in the analysis of productive efficiency, and the number of empirical applications is now very large. Recent theoretical and mathematical research has also contributed to a deeper understanding of the seemingly simple but inherently complex DEA model. Less effor...

In this paper we introduce a new specification of technical inefficiency in panel data models. First, the overall technical inefficiency is decomposed into a persistent component and a residual component. Second, a multistep procedure is used to estimate the parameters of the production function as well as persistent and residual technical ineffici...

Collateral impacts of LULUCF projects, especially those concerning social and environmental aspects, have been recognised as important by the Marrakech Accords. The same applies to the necessity of assessing and, if possible, of quantifying the magnitude of these impacts. This article aims to define, clarify and structure the relevant social, econo...

In this paper, the estimation of production functions and measurement of the rate of technical change is performed when selectivity bias is expected. A sample selection model consisting of a selection and a regression equation is estimated using Heckman's two‐stage method. It is discussed in the context of a production function where the underlying...