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In the intermediate goods industry, largely made up of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), a government can use a matching fund to execute policies that, for example, provide funds to promote and support firms' innovative activities. This study performs an empirical analysis to investigate the additional effects when a government uses a matching fund in this way and, in particular, to analyze the growth of firms. Methodologically, to deal with the selectivity issue, we adopt a propensity score matching (PSM) estimator. We also investigate the performance of the matching fund according to changes in private shares. Our findings show that supported firms invested larger amounts in R&D and procured external financing through an overall improvement in their level of reliability. However, the results also show that this was not connected to further improvements in business performance. Moreover, although our results show some positive impact on assets and R&D expenditure from private investment in the matching fund, the relationship between sales and fixed assets was non-significant.

This paper estimates the gender wage gap and its composition in China’s urban labor market. The traditional Blinder–Oaxaca (1973) decomposition method with different weighing systems is employed. To correct for potential selection bias caused by women’s labor force participation, we employ the Heckman’s two-step procedure to estimate the female wage function. A large proportion of the gender wage gap is unexplained by differences of productive characteristics of individuals. Even though women have higher level of education attainments on average, they receive lower wages than men. Both facts suggest a potential discrimination against women in China.

In this paper, we analyze effects of overlapping policy support. Specifically, we examine two Korean policies related to innovative SMEs, Venture certification and Inno-Biz certification, which have similar goals, targets and benefits. Methodologically, we use the difference in difference method with the propensity score matching method to reduce the selection bias that can occur in policy impact assessment studies. Our results show that in this case of overlapping homogeneous policies, Venture certification and Inno-Biz certification, the complementarity effect is negative. That is, simultaneously supporting these two policies produces no synergy. This result implies that rather than offering multiple supports through double certification of a single firm, offering Inno-Bizcertification to non-supported firms could better increase performance. In other words, policy makers have to consider overlapping policy support before implementing any new policies, and they should not support homogeneous policies for a single group of firms.

Portfolio selection models are programmed by their respective efficiency criteria to fall into a state of first-order condition love with the right sort of outliers. Nothing is changed, unfortunately, when, in general, a deterministic portfolio optimization model's inputs are stochastic rather than parametric. Distributional properties of the input estimator functions employed by four common portfolio selection models are reviewed and their solution algorithms studied in search of unique interactive effects that may mitigate the estimation error problem. Empirical and analytic support is provided for the conclusion that there is one model, an unlikely hero, that is least susceptible.

Look at a typical microfinance institution’s website and you will find heartwarming stories about people who managed to dig themselves out of poverty and into prosperity. Often, these narratives, like the one in Box 9.1, suggest people did not do it just for themselves, but also for their children and communities, so that they, too, could have a better future.