Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. AbstractWith the development of large and long panel databases, the theory surrounding panel causality evolves at a fast pace and empirical researchers may sometimes find it difficult to run the most recent techniques developed in the literature. This article presents the Stata user-written command xtgcause, which implements a procedure proposed by Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) for detecting Granger causality in panel datasets, and thus constitutes an effort to help practitioners understand and apply the test. The command offers the possibility to select the number of lags to include in the model by minimizing the AIC, BIC, or HQIC, and to implement a bootstrap procedure to compute p-values and critical values.JEL Classification: C23, C87.

Identifying outliers in multivariate data is computationally intensive. The bacon command, presented in this article, allows one to quickly identify outliers, even on large datasets of tens of thousands of observations. bacon constitutes an attractive alternative to hadimvo, the only other command available in Stata for the detection of outliers.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the link between human capital depreciation and education level, with an emphasis on potential differences between general and specific education. Design/methodology/approach -A nonlinear wage equation, based on Arrazola and de Hevia's (2004) model, is estimated using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) over the period 1998-2008, in order to estimate a human capital depreciation rate for several education groups. Findings -Human capital depreciation is significantly related to education type. Academic ("concept-based") education protects workers more effectively against depreciation than vocational ("skill-specific") education.Research limitations/implications -The SLFS survey is a rotating panel of five years and no retrospective data on earnings and employment are provided. A study of lifecycle earnings like the one proposed here would clearly benefit from a longer individual observation period.Practical implications -In all educational tracks, even vocational ones, a substantial time share should be devoted to the acquisition of general skills. Moreover, it is necessary to manage lifelong learning carefully in order not to waste initial investments in education. Originality/value -Instead of using a purely quantitative approach to separate workers by years of education, qualitative aspects of educational system are taken into account. Taking advantage of the Swiss educational system characteristics, workers are separated on the basis of their education type. Workers with vocational education (apprenticeships, professional and technical schools and universities of applied sciences) are assumed to possess a relatively specific human capital, compared to those with academic education (high schools and universities).

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. AbstractObtaining the routing distance between two addresses should not be a hassle in the current state of technology. This is unfortunately more complicated than it first seems. Recently, several Stata commands have been implemented for this purpose (traveltime, traveltime3, mqtime, osrmtime), but most of them went out of order only a few months after their introduction or appear as complicated to use. In this paper, we introduce the new command georoute to retrieve travel distance and travel time between two points, defined either by their addresses or by their geographical coordinates. Compared to other existing commands, we argue it is simple to use, efficient in terms of computational speed, and versatile regarding the information that can be provided as input.JEL Classification: C87, R41.

Using cointegration techniques, we investigate the determinants of gasoline demand in Switzerland over the period . We obtain a very weak price elasticity of -0.09 in the short run and -0.34 in the long run. For fuel demand, i.e. gasoline plus diesel, the corresponding price elasticities are -0.08 and -0.27. Our rich dataset allows working with quarterly data and with more explicative variables than usual in this literature. In addition to the traditional price and income variables, we account for variables like vehicles stocks, fuel prices in neighbouring countries, oil shocks and fuel taxes. All of these additional variables are found to be significant determinants of demand. AcknowledgementsThis paper is based on a report (in French) for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. We are grateful for financial support from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. We thank Nicole Mathys, Thomas Bucheli, and the members of the expert team of the project "Research on Price Elasticity of Individual Road Transportation" for their useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Bernard Buchenel, Alexandra Kolly, Philippe Thalmann, Maurice Riedo, Matthias Rufer, Andrea Studer, and Gerda Suter for providing data and comments on earlier versions. The paper does not necessarily represent the views of the project sponsors and we are solely responsible for any remaining error.