Mutual Insurance,Individual Savings,and Limited Commitment

We examine a dynamic model of mutual insurance when households can also engage in self-insurance by storage. We assume that there is no enforcement mechanism, so that any insurance is informal and must be self-enforcing. We show that consumption allocations satisfy a modified Euler condition and that an enhanced storage technology can either improve or diminish welfare. Furthermore we show that the ex ante transfers introduced into dynamic informal insurance models recently by Gauthier et al. (Gauthier, C., Poitevin, M., and González, P. (1997). Journal of Economic Theory76, 106–144) are only used here in the first period, with the role of ex ante transfers being replaced by differential individual storage. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C61, C73, D90, E21.     

Trade and Inequality with Limited Labor Mobility: Theory and Evidence from China

Does globalization increase inequality in developing countries, and if so, how? In a theoretical model of a regionally heterogeneous economy, we show how different regional rates of technical progress due to trade and FDI interact with constraints to unskilled labor mobility. As favored regions benefit more from trade, their growing demand for skills drains skilled workers from disadvantaged areas, and average incomes in the former grow faster than in the latter. Moreover, this unbalanced regional growth may also raise inequality within each region. It could even reduce absolute income per capita in the less favored region. We test these predictions with Chinese data from the Open Door era. Results confirm that different regional growth rates have increased both interregional and intraregional inequality. Moreover, growth of skills‐based export industries in coastal regions is associated, other things equal, with lower incomes for the poor in inland provinces.     

Unemployment Insurance under Moral Hazard and Limited Commitment: Public versus Private Provision

This paper analyzes a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady‐state properties of the optimum private unemployment insurance scheme are established. The interaction between public and private unemployment insurance schemes is examined. Examples are constructed to show that for some parameter values increased public insurance can reduce welfare by crowding out private insurance more than one‐to‐one and that for other parameter values a mix of both public and private insurance can be welfare maximizing.     

Farm Survival and Growth in Transition Economies: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Hungary

Our conceptual model states that new individual farms may begin at a small, even sub-optimal, scale of production and then those farms that are successful will survive and grow, whereas those that are not will remain small and may ultimately be forced to exit from production. The samples of individual farms analysed throughout this article are drawn from the 1998 Farm Survey in Hungary. Our estimation results show that older and larger farms are more likely to survive, farm growth decreases with farm age when farm size is held constant and that learning considerations are important. Beside these standard results, in transition economies farmers', market and industry characteristics have a significant impact on the survival and growth rates of individual farm enterprises.     

Is Grameen Lending Efficient? Repayment Incentives and Insurance in Village Economies

Many believe that a key innovation by the Grameen Bank is to encourage borrowers to help each other in hard times. To analyse this, we study a mechanism design problem where borrowers share information about each other, but their limited side contracting ability prevents them from writing complete insurance contracts. We derive a lending mechanism which efficiently induces mutual insurance. It is necessary for borrowers to submit reports about each other to achieve efficiency. Such cross-reporting increases the bargaining power of unsuccessful borrowers, and is robust to collusion against the bank.     

Rational Partisan Theory: Evidence for Seven OECD Economies

According to the Rational Partisan Theory of business cycles ("RPT"), ex ante uncertainty about the outcome of elections will generate post-election output growth fluctuations. This paper employs vote prediction equations and opinion polls to compute election win probability estimates for 62 elections in seven OECD economies. The probability estimates are used to calibrate partisan intervention terms entered in output growth regressions. For the UK and, to some extent, Canada and Australia, our results are supportive of the RPT. For the US, the calibrated intervention terms are dominated by a partisan dummy variable turned on after each election.     

Inequality and Saving: Further Evidence from Integrated Economies

Renewed attention to inequality and saving has arisen owing to their pronounced implications for global imbalances and financial crises. We show that the relationship between saving and inequality is negative if savers' funds are borrowed by spending households for consumption as in the USA, but positive if saving is allocated through financial systems to investing firms for production as in China. This theoretical result is largely consistent with empirical evidence found from these two increasingly integrated economies and other related countries by estimating panel‐data models. The policy implication is that inequality must be reduced in order to increase saving in the USA and other Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries and to boost consumption in China and other parts of emerging Asia.     

Order with Some Law: Complementarity versus Substitution of Formal and Informal Arrangements

While some argue that incomplete incentive contracts facilitatethe self-enforcement of informal dealings, other authors submitthat they substitute for or "crowd out" social norms supportinginformal arrangements. We use experimental evidence to testthese theories by manipulating the extent to which individualstransact repeatedly and the level of contract costs. We findthat, by enforcing contractible exchange dimensions, contractsfacilitate the self-enforcement of noncontractible dimensions.This complementarity effect is particularly important when repetitionis unlikely and thus self-enforcement is difficult. Althoughour data suggest the existence of reciprocity as an alternative,informal enforcement mechanism, we do not find evidence thatcontracts substitute for this social norm.     

Risk Sharing and Institutional Quality: Evidence from OECD and Emerging Economies

In this paper, we investigate the impact of institutional quality on risk sharing across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging economies (EMEs). It has been found that the quality of institutions and risk sharing are significantly interrelated among OECD members (mostly through credit market channel), but not for the EMEs. Our results are consistent when we control for pre- and post-GFC periods. The reason why the impact of institutional quality on risk sharing is limited among EMEs might be due to the significant monetary injections from advanced economies in the form of remittances and financial aid which might understate other factors that influence risk sharing.     

Severance Payments and Unemployment Insurance: A Commitment Issue

In the event of a job termination, many workers receive severance payments from their employer, in addition to publicly provided unemployment insurance (UI). In the absence of a third party enforcer, contracts featuring severance payments must be supported by an implicit self‐enforcing contract. Workers believe employers will make severance payments only if it is in their best interest ex post. If firms discount the future deeply, they will reduce the severance payment they offer, in order to relax their incentive constraint. Workers are forced to bear risk, and too many workers are laid off. We show that a well‐designed public UI system can correct these distortions.     

Individual versus Village Lending: Evidence from Montenegro

This paper analyzes differences in loan performance across two Montenegrin microfinance institutions with different lending techniques using a sample of individuals borrowing from both institutions. We make use of administrative data from both institutions over the period 2004–2013. While one institution relies on village associations for screening and monitoring of borrowers, the other institution uses the individual liability approach. We find that the likelihood to go into arrears is higher for the institution with a strictly individual lending technique, while the likelihood of going into arrears over 30 days is higher for the institution working with village associations. These results are robust to a variety of additional tests, including different definitions of arrears and subsamples. Our findings suggest that the institution using an individual lending technique provides certain flexibility to its clients, while the village‐based microfinance institution might face more strategic default behavior. We provide evidence that once a borrower is in arrears, (s)he is more likely to stay in arrears for more than 30 days in branches with a higher share of borrowers in arrears and in the village‐based lender. Our findings provide evidence that a village‐ or group‐based lending technique is not necessarily superior to the individual lending technique in terms of loan performance.     

Risk Sharing and Information in Village Economies

Arrangements for achieving efficient risk-sharing vary depending on the information available to agents in the economy. The usual Euler equation restricts efficient allocations in an economy which obeys the permanent income hypothesis, while efficient allocations in an economy with private information and long-term contracts satisfy a symmetric restriction, but not the Euler equation. Full insurance arrangements are unique in that they satisfy both restrictions.
We look at an environment in which it seems likely that long-term contracts play a role in mitigating the effects of private information: three village economies in South India. The evidence that consumption allocations satisfy the private information restriction is quite strong for households in two of the three villages; the evidence for the third village suggests that while consumption for some households satisfies the private information restrictions, other households' consumption obey the permanent income hypothesis.     

The Coevolution of Finance and Property Rights: Evidence from Transition Economies

The transition from communism to capitalism was necessarily accompanied by a sudden and abrupt increase in the financialization of society. This increase occurred in an environment that, even now, still has little experience with or expertise in financialization. Given that financialization occurred simultaneously with the growth and evolution of other political and economic institutions, the question arises: What was the effect on these other nascent institutions like property rights? This article empirically analyzes the relationship between financialization and property rights in transition countries. Using a unique monthly database of twenty transition countries over a period from 1989 to 2012, this article finds that the influence of financialization depends on which definition of “financialization” is used. In particular, increases in basic financial intermediation improved property rights. However, higher-order “financialization,” proxied here by the size of capital markets and the wages in the financial sector, appeared to have a negative impact on the development of broad-based property rights in transition.     

The Monetary Transmission Mechanism: Evidence from Eight Economies in Transition

Abstract

We examine in this paper the importance of banks’ behavior in the transmission of the monetary policy to the real economy. Monthly data from eight economies in transition that recently became members of the European Union and the techniques of cointegration and Error Correction models are used, in order to investigate the relationship between intermediation margin spread (IMS, official lending rate minus deposit rate) and industrial production. Given the low development of corporate bond market and the dependence of non-financial agents on banking credits, we find that in many countries the IMS is an important leading indicator of industrial production. However, in countries characterized by credit access constraints (Estonia and Latvia) evidence for the traditional money channel is found. Evidence for both money and credit channels is found in Poland and Hungary. These results imply that a common monetary policy implemented by the European Central Bank may be transmitted in different ways across the new members of the enlarged European Union with different effects on real output in each country.     

Informal pay gaps in good and bad times: Evidence from Russia

Informal work is traditionally large in Russia and has further increased in the recent years. We explore the implications of this shift in terms of wage dynamics. Our characterization is based on the estimation of informal pay gaps at the mean and along the wage distribution, relying on the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey for 2003–2017. Our approach comprises three original features: we rely on unconditional quantile effects of informality, we incorporate quantile-specific fixed effects using a tractable approach, and we suggest a treatment of the incidental parameter bias. Over the whole period, informal wage penalties are relatively small and do not suggest heavily segmented labor markets, even at low wage levels. Yet, in the past decade, a substantial negative selection into informal employment and self-employment has taken place, on average and especially at low earnings. Economic downturns and labor market policies have likely contributed to the shakeout of less productive workers in the formal sector, making the low-tier informal sector more of a last resort.     

Household Participation in Formal and Informal Savings Mechanisms: Evidence from Pakistan

Savings are an important determinant of both individual and national wellbeing. Typically, households employ a wide range of mechanisms for saving, including both formal and informal institutions. The choice of savings instrument has important micro- and macroeconomic implications. However, little is known empirically about the patterns of use of these instruments, or the factors affecting household decisions/ abilities to use them. The authors apply household-level data from a nationally representative survey for Pakistan to explore these issues in detail. In particular, they focus on the choice between banks and bisi , an informal saving committee similar in nature to a rotating-savings-and-credit association.     

National Health Insurance and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Taiwan

Generous health-insurance coverage may encourage hospitals to acquire and employ more advanced medical technologies. The authors examine the effects of Taiwan's 1995 implementation of National Health Insurance on technology adoption, ownership, and use by comparing changes in adoption, ownership, and use rates by private hospitals with changes by public nonteaching and public teaching hospitals. Using random-effect panel probit and tobit models, the article finds strong empirical evidence that third-party payment increases the probability of technology adoption, ownership, and use. (JEL H4 , I )     

Agglomeration Economies and Productivity Growth in Manufacturing Industry: Empirical Evidence from Indonesia

This study examines the effect of agglomeration economies on productivity growth in Indonesian manufacturing industries during the first decade of this century. Productivity growth is measured at the firm level using the Färe‐Primont Productivity Index. Each firm's productivity growth is then regressed against a set of firm and industry characteristics, including three measures of agglomeration representing the effects of specialisation, diversity and competition. The results show evidence of a positive specialisation effect and a negative diversity effect for aggregate manufacturing and sub‐sectors. Furthermore, there are mixed effects across industries, suggesting that Porter's competition externalities stimulate firm productivity growth under some conditions but not others.     

Local Laws and Venture Capital Contracting in Transition Economies: Evidence from Poland

This study focuses on the legal structuring of venture capital deals in Poland. Three conclusions are derived. First, owing to significant imperfections in the Polish legal infrastructure, local venture capitalists need to consider how to structure their transactions. This represents a unique feature of venture capital investing in emerging markets. The study confirms the existence of three types of legal structures in venture capital investing (i.e. local deals, offshore deals and complex deals), with offshore deals being the predominant category. Second, local venture capitalists display different preferences for various deal structures based on venture capital firms' characteristics. Third, the placement of venture capitalists' rights varies across different legal documents, with the most pronounced difference being observed in local deals. The study is based on a survey of 64 venture capitalists.