A dynamic linear-in-means model is applied in order to analyse the importance of social ties for the body weight-related behaviour of US youth. The methodology shows how to estimate peer effects free of the 'reflection problem' in a dynamic context where individual and group-specific unobservable effects are controlled for. The results show that the main drivers for the body weight-related behaviour are past and peer effects. For individuals who were normal weight or obese during adolescence, past and peer effects are shown to be both relevant. Peer effects, instead, explain more the variation in the body mass index (BMI) for individuals who were overweight during adolescence, showing in this way the importance of social interactions for body weight-related behaviour.

The nexus between firm growth, size and age in U.S. manufacturing is examined through the lens of quantile regression models. This methodology allows us to overcome serious shortcomings entailed by linear regression models employed by much of the existing literature, unveiling a number of important properties. Size pushes both low and high performing firms towards the median rate of growth, while age is never advantageous, and more so as firms are relatively small and grow faster. These findings support theoretical generalizations of Gibrat’s law that allow size to affect the variance of the growth process, but not its mean (Cordoba, 2008).

We empirically assess the distributional impacts and welfare effects of policies to incentivize renewable electricity production for the case of Italy. We use data from the Household Budget Survey between 2000 and 2010 to estimate a demand system in which energy goods' shares of expenditure are modelled using different empirical approaches. We show that the general Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) demand system provides more robust estimates of price elasticities of each composite good than the commonly used Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS). The estimated coefficients are used to perform a welfare analysis of the Italian renewable electricity production incentive policy. We show that different empirical approaches give rise to significantly different estimates of price elasticities and that methodological choices are the reasons for the very high elasticities of substitutions estimated using similar data by previous contributions. We find no evidence of regressivity of the incidence of the Italian renewable incentive scheme in the period under consideration. The renewable subsidies act as a middle-class tax, with the higher welfare losses experienced by households in the second to fourth quintiles of the expenditure distribution.

We examine the eects of aggregate technology shocks on U.S. quoted com- panies'growth rates of real sales. A shock to …rm technology does not simply translate into a mean-preserving spread in the density of …rm growth, but it re- ‡ects a marked reallocation of probability mass over the growth domain. This fact has major implications for the ampli…cation of shocks 'in the aggregate'. We also highlight some distinctive features of the transmission of consumption-speci…c and investment-speci…c technology improvements to the cross section of company growth rates. JEL classi…cation: C21; E32.

The nexus between firm growth, size and age in U.S. manufacturing is examined through the lens of quantile regression models. A number of interesting features are unveiled that linear frameworks could not detect. Size pushes both low and high performing firms towards the median rate of growth, while age is never advantageous, and more so as firms grow faster.

We present an empirical model aimed at testing the relative income hypothesis and the effect of deprivation relative to mean income on subjective well-being. The main concern is to deal with subjective panel data in an ordered response model where error homoskedasticity is not assumed. A heteroskedastic pooled panel ordered probit model with unobserved individual-specific effects is applied to micro-data available in the British Household Panel Survey for 1996–2007. In this framework, absolute income impacts negatively on both completely satisfied and dissatisfied individuals, while relative income affects positively the most satisfied ones. Such an effect is asymmetric, impacting more severely on the relatively poor in the reference group. We argue that our results buttress the validity of the relative income hypothesis as an explanation of the happiness paradox.

The cross-sectional dynamics of the U.S. business cycle is examined through the lens of quantile regression models. Conditioning the quantiles of firm-level growth to different measures of technological change highlights a deep connection between counter-cyclical skewness and the transmission of aggregate disturbances. Asymmetry reversals emerge as the dominant source of cyclical variation in the probability density, generating a powerful amplification of aggregate shocks to firm technology. Designing and validating heterogeneous firm business cycle models should necessarily account for this empirical finding.

Obesity is a rising epidemic. This research study shows that the scale of such a phenomenon is due to the effects of peers on individual weight-related behaviour, as well as to the limits on dynamic behavior imposed by habits. We estimate a dynamic linear-in-means model to analyse the importance of social ties for US youth Body Mass Index. We show that imitation effects explain most of the variation in the Body Mass Index of individuals who were normal-weight and overweight during adolescence. Obese adolescents, instead, become future obese adults through wrong habits enforced by imitative behavior. These findings call for group-level policy interventions, as a social multiplier effect might take place.

We develop an approach for making welfare comparisons between populations with multidimensional discrete well-being indicators observed at the micro level. The approach is rooted in the concept of multidimensional first order dominance. It assumes that, for each indicator, the levels can be ranked ordinally from worse to better; however, no assumptions are made about relative importance of any dimension nor about complementarity/substitutability relationships between dimensions. We also introduce an efficient algorithm for determining dominance and employ a bootstrap approach that permits cardinal rankings of populations. These approaches are applied to household survey data from Vietnam and Mozambique.

This paper analyzes the importance of social ties for eating behavior of US youth. We propose a novel approach that addresses identification of social endogenous effects. We overcome the problem of measuring the separate impact of endogenous and contextual effects on individual Body Mass Index (BMI) in a dynamic linear-in-means model, where individual- and group-specifi c unobservable effects are controlled for. We show that the main drivers of eating behavior are habituation and imitation effects. Imitation effects explain most of the variation in BMI of individuals who were normal-weight and overweight during adolescence. Obese adolescents, instead, become future obese adults through wrong habits enforced by imitative behavior.