Jose Mata - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Jose Mata

European Economic Review, Feb 1, 1996

... See Mata (1992) [k~ra more detailed discussion of the data source. This is not a very impress... more ... See Mata (1992) [k~ra more detailed discussion of the data source. This is not a very impressive figure, however. We will sometimes use the words "small' and 'large', when comparing the size of the smallest and that of the largest new firms. ...

Rev Industrial Organ, 1993

This paper reports on the importance of firm entry and growth flows in Portuguese manufacturing d... more This paper reports on the importance of firm entry and growth flows in Portuguese manufacturing during the period 1982-86, and investigates their determinants. We find that both movements are induced by past profitability and deterred by economies of scale, product differentiation and sunk costs. The analysis does not reject the hypothesis that the determinants of firm entry and growth are quantitatively the same, thereby giving some support to the hypothesis that entry and expansion are close substitutes in absorbing industry excess profits, and that the choice between them does not depend on the height of the entry/mobility barriers.

We propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in se... more We propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in several factors contributing to those changes. The method is based on the estimation of marginal wage distributions consistent with a conditional distribution estimated by quantile regression as well as with any hypothesized distribution for the covariates. Comparing the marginal distributions implied by different distributions for the covariates, one is then able to perform counterfactual exercises. The proposed methodology enables the identification of the sources of the increased wage inequality observed in most countries. Specifically, it decomposes the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time into several factors contributing to those changes, namely by discriminating between changes in the characteristics of the working population and changes in the returns to these characteristics. We apply this methodology to Portuguese data for the period 1986-1995, and find that the observed increase in educational levels contributed decisively towards greater wage inequality.

This paper uses quantile regressions to describe the conditional wage distribution in Portugal an... more This paper uses quantile regressions to describe the conditional wage distribution in Portugal and its evolution over the 1980s as well as the implications for increased wage inequality. We ®nd that, although returns to schooling are positive at all quantiles, education is relatively more valued for highly paid jobs. Consequently, schooling has a positive impact on wage inequality. Moreover, this tendency has sharpened over the period. We also ®nd that most of the estimated change in wage inequality was due to changes in the distribution of the worker's attributes, rather than to increased inequality within a particular type of worker. * This work was started while Jose Â Mata was at the Bank of Portugal and pursued while he was at the Instituto Superior Te Âcnico. We are grateful to seminar audiences at the University of Illinois at Champaign, to Pedro Portugal, and to one referee for useful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Lucena Vieira for computational assistance. The authors gratefully acknowledge research support from program PRAXIS XXI under grant PRAXIS/P/ECO/13005/1998. The usual disclaimer applies.

Page 1. BOX±COX QUANTILE REGRESSION AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF FIRM SIZES JOSEÂ AF MACHADOa* AND JOS... more Page 1. BOX±COX QUANTILE REGRESSION AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF FIRM SIZES JOSEÂ AF MACHADOa* AND JOSEÂ MATAb aFaculdade de Economia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Travessa EstevaÄo Pinto, 1099 ...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate how the skew of a payoff distribution infl... more This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate how the skew of a payoff distribution influences choices under risk. We find a statistically significant preference for positive skew under low and high stakes. We find that the preference for skew is driven by subjective distortion of probabilities and the shape of the utility function. We find that 54% of subjects make choices consistent with Expected Utility Theory (EUT) whereas 46% do not. Among the EUT individuals 47.5% love skew, 49% are indifferent to it, and 3.5% are skew averse. Among the non-EUT individuals 58% like skew and 42% are skew averse. We discuss the economic implications of our findings for gambling in state lotteries and inventive activity. We show that a RDU model calibrated with our estimated parameters is able to explain why individuals only buy from 1 to 10 lottery tickets and why some individuals become inventors.

Research Policy

External innovation increases the profits of the median firm, but also increases dispersion and t... more External innovation increases the profits of the median firm, but also increases dispersion and the kurtosis of the distribution of profits. This means that external strategies are risky and may require a very large number of attempts before average returns are obtained. This puts smaller firms into a position of disproportionately high risk. Despite the earlier evidence that the rewards from innovation are positively skewed, we find no effect of innovation strategies upon the skewness of the distribution of firms’ profits.

Studies in Industrial Organization, 1995

Theory and Decision, 2015

ABSTRACT We propose a task for eliciting attitudes toward risk that is close to real-world risky ... more ABSTRACT We propose a task for eliciting attitudes toward risk that is close to real-world risky decisions which typically involve gains and losses. The task consists of accepting or rejecting gambles that provide a gain with probability \(p\) and a loss with probability \(1-p\) . We employ finite mixture models to uncover heterogeneity in risk preferences and find that (i) behavior is heterogeneous, with one half of the subjects behaving as expected utility maximizers, (ii) for the others, reference-dependent models perform better than those where subjects derive utility from final outcomes, (iii) models with sign-dependent decision weights perform better than those without, and (iv) there is no evidence for loss aversion. The procedure is sufficiently simple so that it can be easily used in field or lab experiments where risk elicitation is not the main experiment.

Research Policy, 2013

ABSTRACT External innovation increases the profits of the median firm, but also increases dispers... more ABSTRACT External innovation increases the profits of the median firm, but also increases dispersion and the kurtosis of the distribution of profits. This means that external strategies are risky and may require a very large number of attempts before average returns are obtained. This puts smaller firms into a position of disproportionately high risk. Despite the earlier evidence that the rewards from innovation are positively skewed, we find no effect of innovation strategies upon the skewness of the distribution of firms’ profits.

The Portuguese Economy Towards 1992, 1992

American Economic Review, 2003

Since the seminal study by Robert Gibrat (1931), several authors have looked at the patterns of f... more Since the seminal study by Robert Gibrat (1931), several authors have looked at the patterns of firm growth and their implications for the firm size distribution (FSD): Peter E. Hart and Sigbert J. Prais (1956), Herbert A. ...