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This paper investigates the degree to which self-selection explains the apparent higher purchase value of research shoppers.

An online survey was administered to 594 retail shoppers. The purchase value of research shoppers and single-channel shoppers was compared before and after propensity score matching to account for self-selection effects.

Prior to matching, research shoppers spend significantly more than single-channel shoppers. This difference persists after accounting for self-selection but is reduced by 25%. The impact of self-selection differs across product categories and channels, with the online channel most likely to lead to higher purchase value.

The findings build on existing literature on the value of omni-channel retail strategies and provide insights for retailers to determine the likely impact of encouraging research shopping among their customers.

The research provides important insights into the role that self-selection plays in the value of multi-channel shoppers, and the likely value to retailers of omni-channel strategies.

This paper aims to address the following research question: Is loan funding to female entrepreneurs in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco affected by self-selection from borrowers or/and discrimination from lenders? This paper sheds light on empirical literature review, which displays mixed evidence.

The authors use a pooled sample of 3,896 businesses in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia drawn from the 2013 World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES). Despite selection biases and overweighing, the sample provides descriptive statistics upon gender ownership and gender management (human capital characteristics and financial data). The authors design two regression logistic models with interaction to investigate loan demand and loan granting with respect to self-selection vs discrimination. Female management is disentangled from female ownership with respect to entrepreneurship.

Neither self-selection nor discrimination affects female owners compared with their male counterparts, whereas female managers do self-select themselves. In as much as the WBES female subsample include several biases, the authors eventually emphasise the importance of the non-surveyed informal sector, which includes most (micro-)businesses, and loan funding provided by the microfinance industry to these female businesses. Microfinance fills the gap for working capital but not for fixed assets. The size of the business is a major factor explaining both self-selection and discrimination.

Findings of this study have important policy implications for closing the gender gap in accessing finance. In addition to supply-side factors, demand-side factors should be addressed. Informality also needs to be addressed, as many micro and small enterprises owned or managed by women are informal entities without registration or/and social protection. One way to increase women's demand for financial services is to introduce financial products to meet their needs (e.g. social protection basic coverage). Governments can help develop these new products by strengthening the microfinance industry with a favourable regulatory and institutional framework. The authors also wonder about the extension of this study. Thus, a new cross-sectional analysis of the most recent surveys in the North African region would allow the authors to enlarge the overall sample and measure the evolution of the gender gap over time.

So far, funding female entrepreneurship remained little investigated in these North African countries. Several sampling biases in the WBES – small businesses underestimation and manufacturing industry overweighting, which have been overlooked so far, explain the absence of self-selection and discrimination. In contrast, size plays an important role. Hence, the focus on microenterprises (the informal sector) and the microfinance industry suggests indeed that female entrepreneurs operating in small businesses have to cope with both self-selection and discrimination.

This paper aims to examine the interrelation between two innovating strategies (product and process) on total factor productivity (TFP) growth and the dynamic linkages between these strategies, for Colombia. The authors first explore whether ex ante more productive firms are those that introduce innovations (the self-selection hypothesis) and if the introduction of innovations boosts TFP growth (the returns-to-innovation hypothesis). Second, the authors study the firm’s joint dynamic decision to implement process and/or product innovations. The authors use Colombian manufacturing data from the Annual Manufacturing and the Technological Development and Innovation Surveys.

This study uses a four-stage procedure. First, the authors estimate TFP using a modified version of Olley and Pakes (1996) and Levinsohn and Petrin (2003), proposed by De Loecker (2010), that implements an endogenous Markov process where past firm innovations are endogenized. This TFP would be estimated by GMM, Wooldridge (2009). Second, the authors use multivariate discrete choice models to test the self-selection hypothesis. Third, the authors explore, using multi-value treatment evaluation techniques, the life span of the impact of innovations on productivity growth (returns to innovation hypothesis). Fourth, the authors analyse the joint likelihood of implementing process and product innovations using dynamic panel data bivariate probit models.

The investigation reveals that the self-selection effect is notably more pronounced in the adoption of process innovations only, as opposed to the adoption of product innovations only or the simultaneous adoption of both process and product innovations. Moreover, our results uncover distinct temporal patterns concerning innovation returns. Specifically, process innovations yield immediate benefits, whereas implementing both product innovations only and jointly process and product innovations exhibit significant, albeit delayed, advantages. Finally, the analysis confirms the existence of dynamic interconnections between the adoption of process and product innovations.

The contribution of this work to the literature is manifold. First, the authors thoroughly investigate the relationship between the implementation of process and product innovations and productivity for Colombian manufacturing explicitly recognising that firms’ decisions of adopting product and process innovations are very likely interrelated. Therefore, the authors start exploring the self-selection and the returns to innovation hypotheses accounting for the fact that firms might implement process innovations only, product innovations only and both process and product innovations. In the analysis of the returns of innovation, the fact that firms may choose among a menu of three innovation strategies implies the use of evaluation methods for multi-value treatments. Second, the authors study the dynamic inter-linkages between the decisions to implement process and/or product innovations, that remains under studied, at least for emerging economies. Third, the estimation of TFP is performed using an endogenous Markov process, where past firms’ innovations are endogenized.

Entrepreneurial learning through formal growth-oriented training programs for SME managers promises to enhance the growth competences and growth intentions of the enrolled managers. The impact of such programs, however, depends on who enrolls since initial competence and growth-intention levels vary significantly. Potential participants may suffer from limited ability to transform new knowledge into practice, absence of growth intention and too high or too low a prior competence level to be able to benefit substantially. Selection and self-selection processes therefore have a bearing on the extent to which such programs result in additionality, i.e. improved growth performance compared to non-intervention. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Selection and self-selection processes are explored through a study of a large-scale training program for growth-oriented managers of small Danish firms. This program has, from 2012 to 2015, trained about 700 SME managers. Data are currently available for 366 of these participants. This evidence is compared with survey results from a randomly selected control group of 292 growth-oriented SME managers in the same firm-size group. The data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis.

A number of selection and self-selection biases were identified in the analysis. While some of the identified biases did not seem to conflict with the ambitions of this growth program, others potentially have consequences for the additionality of the program.

The paper is the first systematic study of the importance of who enrolls in training programs for SME managers.

The paper seeks to analyse the self‐selection of international migrants on observable skills.

Based on an extended version of the Roy model, which considers random migration costs, the authors analyse the self‐selection of migrants on observable skills empirically. For this purpose, the authors employ a new panel data set on the educational attainment of migrants, which covers migration from 143 sending countries into the six main receiving countries in the OECD from 1975 to 2000.

Migrants tend to be positively self‐selected on observable skills, although the inequality in earnings is larger in the sending country relative to the destination countries. The estimation results indicate that a higher inequality in the distribution of earnings in both the receiving and the sending country affects the skill bias of the migrant population favourably. Moreover, higher migration costs and selective immigration policies increase the skill level of migrants relative to those of stayers in the sending countries.

The results may be affected by measurement error, since it was necessary to approximate the returns to education by measures for the inequality of earnings.

The paper provides, inter alia, insights as to how immigration and other policies affect the self‐selection of migrants on observable skills, which may be relevant for policy makers.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to analyse the self‐selection of migrants on the basis of a panel data set.

Whilst substantial evidence from low-corruption, developed market environments supports the view that more productive firms are more likely to export, there has been little research into analysing the link between productivity and exports in high corruption, developing market environments. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to test the premise of self-selection theory whether the association between productivity and export is maintained in high-corruption environments, and second to identify other variables explaining export activity in high-corruption contexts, including cluster networks and firms’ competences.

The authors draw on the World Bank Enterprise survey to undertake a cross-section analysis including 1,233 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) located in nine African countries. The advantage of this database is that it contains information about the level of perceived corruption at firm level. Logistic regressions are performed for the full sample and for subsamples of firms in high- and low-corruption environments.

The findings demonstrate that the self-selection theory only applies to low-corruption environments, whereas in high-corruption environments, alternative factors such as cluster networks and outward-looking competences (OLC) exert a stronger influence on the exporting activity of African SMEs.

This research contributes to the theory as it provides evidence that contradicts the validity of self-selection theory in high-corruption environments. The findings would benefit from further longitudinal investigation.

African SMEs need to consider cluster networks and OLC as important strategic factors that might enhance their international competitiveness.

The criticism of the self-selection theory is distinctive in the literature and has important implications for future research. The authors show that the contextualisation of existing theories matters and this opens a research avenue for further more sensitive contextualisation of existing theories in developing economies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the introduction of a liberalised regime for labour immigration in Sweden affected the self-selection of new immigrant entrepreneurs and to what extent the changes in entrepreneurial income among new immigrants was due to self-selection or to a changing business environment.

Based on rich microdata from Swedish administrative registers, this paper investigates how incomes changed during the years before and after the migration policy reform. By decomposing the income differential of new immigrant entrepreneurs arriving before and after the reform, this study estimates the contribution of a changed composition of migrants to the changing entrepreneurial income.

Entrepreneurial income among self-employed new immigrants improved after the reform, narrowing the immigrant–native income gap, while among employees, the income gap remained during the whole period of the study. Out of the total 10.9 per cent increase in log income, the authors find that 2.7 per cent was due to selectivity, i.e., changing characteristics of new immigrant entrepreneurs. The remaining 8.2 per cent was due to increased returns to characteristics, i.e., the characteristics of new immigrant entrepreneurs were better rewarded in the markets in the latter period. Hence, increases in entrepreneurial income among new immigrants were due both to self-selection and changes in the business environment.

The authors find that the migration policy reform had the effect of attracting successful immigrant entrepreneurs. Hence, the findings have implications for migration policy as well as for growth and employment policy.

This paper reveals a positive trend regarding income from the entrepreneurship of new immigrants after the liberalisation of labour immigration policy in Sweden. Theoretically and methodologically, the authors combine self-selection theory and the mixed-embeddedness perspective in a novel way, using rich data and a quantitative approach.

Past research on self-employment and health yielded conflicting findings. Integrating predictions from the Stressor-Strain Outcome model, research on challenge stressors and allostatic load, we predict that physical and mental health are affected by self-employment in distinct ways which play out over different time horizons. We also test whether the health impacts of self-employment are due to enhanced stress (work-related strain) and differ for man and women.

We apply non-parametric propensity score matching in combination with a difference-in-difference approach and longitudinal cohort data to examine self-selection and the causal relationship between self-employment and health. We focus on those that transit into self-employment from paid employment (opportunity self-employment) and analyze strain and health over four years relative to individuals in paid employment.

Those with poorer mental health are more likely to self-select into self-employment. After entering self-employment, individuals experience a short-term uplift in mental health due to lower work-related strain, especially for self-employed men. In the longer-term (four years) the mental health of the self-employed drops back to pre-self-employment levels. We find no effect of self-employment on physical health.

Our research helps to understand the nonpecuniary benefits of self-employment and suggests that we should not advocate self-employment as a “healthy” career.

This article advances research on self-employment and health. Grounded in stress theories it offers new insights relating to self-selection, the temporality of effects, the mediating role of work-related strain, and gender that collectively help to explain why past research yielded conflicting findings.

Although most empirical studies find that competitive bidding can reduce the interest cost, the municipal bond primary market is dominated by negotiating offerings. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this dilemma by empirically testing two hypotheses: self-selection bias and decision inertia hypotheses.

Logistic regressions and Heckman procedures are used to examine data from the California municipal bond primary market.

The paper finds that while information asymmetry does affect the selection of underwriting approach, self-selection bias cannot explain the cost difference between the two sale approaches. On the other hand, decision inertia has the highest explanatory power in the selection of sale approaches.

This paper provides a new explanation for the “competitive sale dilemma” from the perspective of decision inertia. The authors document that state and local governments show a greater propensity of adhering to previous choices, particularly in a context in which the outcome is uncertain or actors have little knowledge in comparing the outcome of the alternatives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if and how entrepreneurial assistance programs, through guided preparation, affect start-up success.

–This study uses Heckman's two-stage sample selection model to predict the effect of contact and interactions with entrepreneurial support programs on start-up outcomes while taking into account the entrepreneur's self-selection into obtaining support from these programs.

The results indicate that, after controlling for individual characteristics, activities undertaken during the start-up process, organizational characteristics and external factors, guided preparation contributes to a greater likelihood of achieving positive start-up outcome. This finding holds even after controlling for the entrepreneur's self-selection into contacting and using outside assistance.

Results suggest that self-selection bias remains a concern when studying the impact of assistance programs on start-up outcomes. Future research should make sure to address self-selection in their analysis.

The study's results have implications for the design of start-up programs. It highlights the importance of delivery structures that are fluid, flexible, interactive, experiential, and tailored to the individual entrepreneur's needs.

This study focusses on assistance programs broadly defined (includes many different types of programs) and provides an empirical analysis that addresses self-selection.