Henrik Hansen

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Verified

Henrik verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Head of Department at University of Copenhagen

Motivation Workplace training is an indispensable part of workforce skill development, but it is often provided irregularly and selectively in private enterprises. This is a missed opportunity given its potential to contribute to employee wellbeing and human capital development, and to boost firm performance. Purpose We examine workplace training...

Using two surveys from 2017, we analyze the gender wage gap for urban workers in Myanmar. We start from a standard wage equation and condition on education, experience, health and a small set of household demographic attributes. Subsequently we control for differences in occupational choice and sector of employment. We estimate the models with samp...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-021-00419-8

The objective of this study is to map and analyse fiscal responses to COVID-19 in Danida's priority countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study analyses selected countries' fiscal fore-casts and budgets covering the past 3 years to estimate both actual changes and deviations from published planning documents. Hence, the study provides a relatively s...

We look into the relationship between business practices and enterprise productivity using panel data with matched employer and employee information from Myanmar. The data show that micro, small, and medium-size enterprises in Myanmar typically do only a few modern business practices. Even so, through estimates of value-added functions and labour d...

Using a survey of enterprises in Myanmar, we examine demand for formal credit and the extent to which firms are self-constrained by not applying for credit or if they apply and are constrained by bank’s rejections. We have information about firm managers’ managerial capacity and risk attitude. We use this to test if the allocation of loanable funds...

Employer-provided benefits are independent elements in the compensation packages that make up firms’ payment strategies. Such benefits are aimed at attracting and retaining preferred employees and improving incentives. In Myanmar, there are two employee benefit systems: (1) an unregulated traditional system in which firms offer their employees in-k...

Angus Deaton fik Nobelprisen i økonomi i 2015 for bidrag inden for tre beslægtede områder: (i) Formuleringen af efterspørgselssystemet ”the Almost Ideal Demand System”, som han udviklede i samarbejde med John Muellbauer; (ii) hans analyser af sammenhængen mellem forbrug og indkomst over tid; og (iii) hans mangeårige arbejde med måling og analyser a...

We estimate the average rate of return on investments financed by aid and by domestic resource mobilisation, using aggregate data. Both returns are expected to vary across countries and time. Consequently we develop a correlated random coefficients model to estimate the average returns. Across different estimators and two different data sources for...

Using Vietnamese Labour Force Survey data we analyse the impact of minimum wage changes on wage inequality. Minimum wages serve to reduce local wage inequality in the formal sectors by decreasing the gap between the median wages and the lower tail of the local wage distributions. In contrast, local wage inequality is increased in the informal secto...

Systematic reviews are increasingly used to inform policy makers about the usefulness of interventions. We stress the importance of the research question and argue that traditional Cochrane reviews work best for the focused question 'what works', while many policy interventions give rise to complex questions such as 'when', 'why', 'how' and 'for wh...

Based on firm level data from 16 Sub-Saharan African countries we show how three different measures of credit constraints lead to three different estimates of gender differences in manufacturing firms’ credit situation. Using a perception based credit constraint measure female owned firms appear relatively more constrained than male owned firms. Us...

We estimate the causal effect of food standards on Vietnamese pangasius farmers’ wellbeing measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression. Our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from...

We examine credit constraint differentials between male and female manufacturing entrepreneurs using firm data from 16 sub-Saharan Africa countries. Small enterprises owned by female entrepreneurs are less likely to be credit constrained compared to their male counterparts, while this is reversed for medium-sized enterprises. A generalised Oaxaca–B...

We argue that non-experimental impact estimators will continue to be needed for evaluations of interventions in developing countries as social experiments, for various reasons, will never be the most preferred approach. In a survey of four studies that empirically compare the performance of experimental and non-experimental impact estimates using d...

We estimate the causal effect of food standards on Vietnamese pangasius farmers’ wellbeing measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression. Our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from...

The focus on results in development agencies has led to increased focus on impact evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness of development programmes. A range of methods are available for counterfactual analysis of infrastructure interventions, as illustrated by the variety of papers in this volume. Understanding impact means understanding the co...

This paper investigates the short-run macroeconomic impact of aid in small developing countries (SDCs) by using a vector auto regression (VAR) model to study the impact of aid on net import (absorption) and domestic demand (spending). We focus on average country effects within two country sub-groups, and find substantial differences between 'aid-de...

The study estimates an empirical model of return intentions using a dataset compiled from an internet survey of Turkish professionals residing abroad. In the migration literature, wage differentials are often cited as an important factor explaining skilled migration. The findings of our study suggest, however, that non-pecuniary factors, such as th...

This paper analyses whether direct government assistance during start-up and other forms of interaction with the state sector have influenced the long-run performance of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. Using three partly overlapping surveys during the period 1990-2000, we find strong effects on firm dynamics from...

Forecasting using factor models based on large data sets has received ample attention due to the models' ability to increase forecast accuracy with respect to a range of key macroeconomic variables in the US and the UK. However, forecasts based on such factor models do not uniformly outperform the simple autoregressive model when using data from ot...

The purpose of the present Evaluation Study is to discuss the methodological problems researchers are facing in gauging the impact of aid on economic growth. The discussion is nontechnical and aimed at an audience without much prior knowledge in the fields of macroeconomics and econometrics. The paper provides insights into the following questions:...

We suggest a convenient version of the omnibus test for normality, using skewness and kurtosis based on Shenton and Bowman [Journal of the American Statistical Association (1977) Vol. 72, pp. 206-211], which controls well for size, for samples as low as 10 observations. A multivariate version is introduced. Size and power are investigated in compar...

This paper examines whether there is spatial integration between and within paddy markets in the north and south of Vietnam. The empirical model developed uses estimates of transfer costs to generalise Ravallion's model of spatial market integration to allow for threshold effects. A sequential testing strategy is used to test for market segmentatio...

The last few years have seen large increases in the world market prices of food. Following a steady increase by 25 percent between 2003 and 2006, the FAO food price index rose by 57 percent be-tween March 2007 and March 2008. Developments in the markets for the three staple commodities, maize, wheat and rice have been particularly dramatic with wor...

With its increasing integration into the world economy, agricultural exports and rural incomes in Vietnam have increased substantially in recent years. At the sub-national level, however, there are concerns that not all regions and categories of agricultural producers have and will benefit from the ongoing liberalization of agricultural markets. V...

This paper examines the recent decentralization of governance in Indonesia and its impact on local infrastructure provision. The decentralization of decisionmaking power to local jurisdictions in Indonesia may have improved the matching of public infrastructures provision with local preferences. However, decentralization has made local public infra...

Together with high economic growth, redistribution of public funds has been an important topic for both researchers and policy makers over the last few years. Since 1997 there have been at least six analyses on the incidence of public transfer programs all using the 1992/93 and 1997/98 household surveys (VLSSs). The general conclusion in these stud...

This paper explores the empirical relation between e-government and corruption in a large cross-section of countries covering the 1997-2002 period. We show that higher levels of e-government are causally associated with signi…cantly lower levels of corruption. Results are shown to be robust and to carry economic signi…cance. This leads us to conclu...

We analyse the Granger causal relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI) and GDP in a sample of 31 developing countries covering 31 years. Using estimators for heterogeneous panel data we find bi-directional causality between the FDI-to-GDP ratio and the level of GDP. FDI has a lasting impact on GDP, while GDP has no long-run impact on t...

This paper investigates the marginal productivity of investment in the world’s poorest economies. The aim is to estimate the return on investments financed by foreign aid as well as by domestic resource mobilization, using crosscountry aggregate data. In practice the return on both investment categories can be expected to vary considerably across c...

: This paper presents simulated out-of-sample forecasts based on diffusion in-dexes for monthly Danish macroeconomic data. The diffusion indexes are derived from 246 series (172 monthly and 74 quarterly series). The primary focus is on forecasts of unemploy-ment, industrial turnover, and inflation at horizons of 6, and 12 months over the period 199...

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous studies we find that the US exerted a significant infl...

http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/books-and-journals/2004/en_GB/Debt-Relief-for-Poor-Countries/

http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/books-and-journals/2004/en_GB/Debt-Relief-for-Poor-Countries-paperback/

The present paper re-examines the effectiveness of foreign aid theoretically and empirically. Using a standard OLG model we show that aid inflows will in general affect long-run productivity. The size and direction of the impact may depend on policies, 'deep' structural characteristics and the size of the inflow. The empirical analysis investigates...

The two main competing theories for the outward shift in the uv-curve are investigated: increased separations from employment at a given employment level (reallocation) and decreased levels of hires, given unemployment and vacancies (mismatch). Shifts in the unemployment-vacancy (uv)-curve and the hiring function are modelled by smooth transition f...

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Additionality. in the sense that debt relief should supplement, not replace, the flow of development aid is a key concept underlying the HIPC Initiative. But assessing the additionality of HIPC debt relief is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible. Some writers (e.g. Birdsall and Williamson, 2002), expect only modest additionality from bil...

In this paper we provide evidence on the survival and growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam relying on three partly overlapping enterprise surveys sampled during the period 1990-2002. Our empirical results indicate that classical determinants of performance including firm age, firm size, location, ownership, degree of capit...

This paper studies the theoretical and empirical implications of monetary policy making by committee under four different voting protocols. The protocols are a consensus model, where a supermajority is required for a policy change; an agenda-setting model, where the chairman controls the agenda; a dictator model, where the chairman has absolute pow...

Based on Cox and Reid (1987) adjustments of likelihood ratio (LR) tests for unit roots in higher-order autoregressive models are proposed. While unit root inference does not fit directly into the framework of Cox and Reid, the ideas are applied in models with multi-dimensional parameters of interest and only asymptotic orthogonality of parameters....

Some methods for the evaluation of parameter constancy in cointegrated vectorautoregressive (VAR) models are discussed. Two different ways of re-estimating the VAR-model are proposed; one in which all parameters are estimated recursively based upon the likelihood function for the first observations, and another in which the cointegrating relations...

We study the Danish unemployment experience 1905-92 using a common trends model with cointegration constraints. To justify the identifying assumptions about the cointegration vectors and the common trends we present a simple macroeconomic model of the labor market. The model determines the long run behavior of labor productivity, employment, unempl...

This study provides a critical analysis of the growth regressions in Burnside and Dollar [2000]. First, we analyse the relationship between aid and government expenditure in a modified neo-classical growth model. One of the main results of the analysis is that while good policies spur growths they may at the same time reduce the effectiveness of fo...

This paper examines the relationship between foreign aid and growth in real GDP per capita as it emerges from simple augmentations of popular cross-country growth specifications. It is shown that aid in all likelihood increases the growth rate, and this result is not conditional on ‘good’ policy. There are, however, decreasing returns to aid, and t...

There is a widespread perception among academic researchers and aid practitioners alike that empirical cross-country analysis fails to find any significant link between aid flows and growth, and that aid is successful only when associated with good policies in the recipient countries. These positions do not stand up to careful scrutiny of existing...

There is a widespread perception among academic researchers and aid practitioners alike that empirical cross-country analysis fails to find any significant link between aid flows and growth, and that aid is successful only when associated with good policies in the recipient countries. These positions do not stand up to careful scrutiny of existing...

We study the Danish unemployment experience 1905-92 using a common trends model with cointegration constraints. To justify the identifying assumptions about the cointegration vectors and the common trends we present a simple macroeconomic model of the labor market. The model determines the long run behavior of labor productivity, employment, unempl...

We examine the relative import demand and relative prices for roundwood in cointegration/common trends framework. A theoretical model is proposed describing relative import demand and the price setting behaviour for domestic users and suppliers of roundwood. The model is estimated using Danish data from 1956–1995. The estimated model has one statio...

http://www.springer.com/economics/history+ec.+thoughts/book/978-0-7923-8404-5?cm_mmc=sgw-_-ps-_-book-_-0-7923-8404-0

This paper is a study of Danish aid policy from the early 1960s to 1995. It includes (i) a review of officially stated aims and criteria, (ii) a descriptive analysis of actual behaviour in international comparative perspective, (iii) a review of the theoretical and empirical aid allocation literature, and (iv) a series of panel data regressions to...

We study the Danish unemployment experience 1905-92 using a multivariate common trends model with cointegration constraints. To interpret the empirical results we analyse a simple macroeconomic model of the labor market. The empirical results indicate that there are three cointegration relations and two common trends among the five variables we exa...

Some methods for the evaluation of parameter constancy in cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) models are discussed. Two different ways of re-estimating the VAR-model are proposed; one in which all parameters are estimated recursively based upon the likelihood function for the first observations, and another in which the cointegrating relations...

In this paper we present and compare several different models for private consump- tion in Denmark. Based on some straightforward theoretical assumptions we for- mulate three basic functional forms. The first is a log-log model inspired by the celebrated DHSY consumption function, which is the formulation presently used in the macro econometric mod...

The present paper re-examines the effectiveness of foreign aid theoretically and empirically. Using a standard OLG model we show that aid inflows will in general affect long-run pro- ductivity. The size and direction of the impact may depend on policies, 'deep' structural characteristics and the size of the inflow. The empirical analysis investigat...

Using firm level data from eight Sub-Saharan Africa countries we examine credit constraint differentials between male and female manufacturing entrepreneurs. Enterprises owned by female entrepreneurs are less likely to be credit constrained compared to their male counterparts. The magnitude of this credit constraint gap varies with constraint and o...

In a model of imitation it is demonstrated that an economy's technological develop-ment is positively correlated with its human capital stock implying that a change in education affects the growth rate of GDP both directly through its impact on output and indirectly through its impact on the ability to adopt new technologies. In addition to human c...