Assessing the Reliability of Self‐reported Income Information in Informal Small Business Lending through a Bogus Pipeline Experiment

Coping with asymmetric information plays a major role in successful small business lending. Our purpose is to determine if small business applicants report their income information correctly when requesting a loan. We use a randomised controlled trial bogus pipeline experiment, established during a typical cash‐flow analysis of a bank for small businesses in the Philippines. The bogus pipeline approach is commonly applied in social science and aims to increase the rate of truth telling by informing participants that answers will be verified by a lie detector. The experimental data, which include 243 observations of credit clients that are mainly from the agricultural and food value chain, served to identify asymmetric information. Additionally, debtors’ repayment behaviour for approved loans was observed by the bank. Our results indicate that loan applicants of the treatment group report lower incomes, an effect which is most pronounced in lower income quantile. Our analyses also reveal higher loan delinquencies in the control group.     

Mycogen as a Case Study in Real Options

This article provides a primer on the use of real options valuation in a strategic agribusiness setting. Using the Mycogen case study as an example, the article provides a qualitative approach to strategic risk management. The article introduces a number of real options such as the option to wait and the option to learn and illustrates how prudent use of these options can give rise to firm value in an agribusiness setting.     

Income risk and farm consumption behavior

Using panel data from Illinois grain farmers, a direct test of the relationship between income risk and farm consumption behavior is conducted. The estimation results indicate that income risk significantly affects farm consumption and the results are robust using alternative risk measures. This finding casts doubt on the relevance of the conventional life-cycle permanent income hypothesis, which implies that risk has no effect on consumption.     

Market Structure and the Value of Agricultural Contingent Claims

In this paper, we evaluate the proposition that market structure, including supply and demand elasticities, plays a significant role in influencing equilibrium price dynamics. We show that the more inelastic the demand and/or supply of a commodity is, the more price risk will be faced by producers of that commodity. In general one can expect greater volatility from commodities with both demand and supply being inelastic, and the least when they are both elastic. We illustrate how the elasticities of supply and demand can impact the prices of contingent claims on agricultural commodities including revenue insurance.
Dans le présent article, nous évaluons la proposition selon laquelle la structure de marché, y compris l'élasticité de l'offre et de la demande, influence la dynamique du prix d'équilibre. Nous montrons que plus la demande et/ou l'offre d'un produit de base est inélastique, plus les producteurs de ce produit de base sont confrontés au risque de prix. En général, on peut s'attendre à une forte volatilité des produits de base pour lesquels l'offre et la demande sont à la fois inélastiques, et à une faible volatilité lorsqu'elles sont élastiques. Nous faisons ressortir de quelle façon l'inélasticité de l'offre et de la demande peut influencer les réclamations éventuelles concernant des produits agricoles de base, y compris l'assurance−revenu.     

信任、利率与农村金融市场竞合关系——中国农村小额信贷市场的理论模型

本文立足于孟加拉格莱闵银行(GB模式)小额信贷运作的理念和原理建立小额信贷市场一般模型,并衍生出中国农村小额信贷市场的理论模型及其扩展模型,通过模型分析,认为信任在小额信贷市场中扮演了重要角色,农村信用社、微型金融组织(MFI)、非政府组织(NGO)等信任不同收入水平的农户群体,农村信用社行政性低贷款利率难以覆盖小额信贷业务的经营成本和贷款风险,并导致"市场挤出MFI(NGO)"现象发生,影响了农村小额信贷市场上MFI、NGO、农村信用社、民间借贷等的公平竞争和有效合作,据此提出相应的对策。     

Equity and efficiency considerations in area versus individual yield insurance

Equity and efficiency considerations in area versus individual crop insurance are investigated for 609 Ontario cash crop farms. Results show that the relationship between individual and area premiums and risk reduction are explained by systematic and non-systematic yield risk relationships. On average, area insurance premiums are much lower than individual yield insurance premiums, and in terms of efficiency in risk-reduction individual plans are superior to area plans. As it turns out arguments of asymmetric information which has lead some researchers to investigate area vs. individual yield insurance is not totally resolved. Inequities in the benefits of area plans across farmers are not equitably distributed, favouring high-risk producers. Adverse selection causes instability in the pooled contracts which will ultimately cause area insurance plans to fail.     

Attitudinal Asymmetries and the Lender-Borrower Relationship: Survey Results on Farm Lending in Shandong,China

This paper addresses the problem of social interactions and the lender-borrower relationship by measuring the disconnect between borrowers and lenders across a wide range of lending-related attributes. The degree by which lenders and borrowers connect disconnect depends on whether lenders’ and borrowers’ perceptions across these attributes are symmetric or asymmetric. We compare field survey results from 120 loan officers at Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs) in China’s coastal Shandong province, and pair them with an existing survey on identical questions to 394 farm households in the same region. Pairing lenders’ perception towards borrowers regarding RCC microcredit lending mechanism, against borrowers’ perception towards lenders and how themselves were perceived by lenders in the same regards, we observe on many dimensions a disconnect between them in the context of lenders’ “care” towards borrowers, loan rejection, memberships of RCC and group guarantee, lending concerns, cost of borrowing, reasons for default, credit rationing, and lending preferences. This research provides financial institutions with outreach mechanisms to borrowers, while also training lenders to borrowers’ sensitivities.