Adoption of mobile money and financial inclusion: a macroeconomic approach through cluster analysis

This paper investigates the patterns of adoption of mobile money in emerging and developing countries. Mobile money is a mobile-based service, which provides access to low-cost financial services for people excluded from the banking system. It is designed to overcome the difficulties related to entering the banking system and the unavailability of banking infrastructure. Drawing on macroeconomic comparative and case study analysis conducted by practitioner experts, this study takes a wide macroeconomic approach to the adoption of mobile money adoption in 2011 and 2014, based on the alternative strategy of cluster analysis. We exploit the new technology diffusion frameworks to evaluate dissimilarity among groups of countries with similar levels of adoption of mobile money. We investigate whether adoption of mobile money services are highest in countries where access to formal banking services is lowest. Our analytical results support the predictions in the technology diffusion literature and nuance the potential of mobile money as a tool to counter banking exclusion.     

Mobile money,risk sharing,and educational investment: Panel evidence from rural Uganda

We examine the impact of the rapidly expanding mobile banking service “mobile money” on rural households' ability to smooth investment in schooling after a negative shock. We find that a negative shock induces a 9.3‐percentage point decrease in per school‐age child educational expenditure for households who do not use mobile money compared to an 8.3‐percentage point decrease for households that have adopted mobile money. The underlying mechanism is an increase in remittance receipt and the diversity of senders owing to the reduction in transactions cost provided by mobile money. We show that our results are robust to alternative mechanisms. We use the expansion in mobile money agent network as an exogenous variation in access to mobile money.     

Usage of formal financial services in India: Demand barriers or supply constraints?

Estimating the role of both demand-side and supply-side factors in financial inclusion and its distribution is important for policy making. However, existing literature has primarily focused on supply-side factors. In this context, this paper estimates relative importance of removing demand-side barriers and eliminating supply constraints to enhance financial inclusion in India. It also measures the extent of concentration of usage of formal financial services among richer households. Results suggest that, while availability of banking services has a significant positive effect on usage of formal financial services, its contribution in inducing households to use formal financial services is very small compared to the contribution of factors, such as education, income, employment status, gender and social norms, that influence the demand for formal financial services. It highlights the importance of placing greater emphasis on addressing demand-side barriers, rather than on improving physical availability of banking services, to promote financial inclusion in India.     

Religiosity and the adoption of formal financial services

Recent studies have suggested that institutional and economic factors are important drivers of financial inclusion. However, the effects of culture on the usage and adoption of formal financial services are not as widely understood. This paper explores the impact of religiosity on financial inclusiveness, utilizing aggregated data from individuals’ religious preferences and financial behaviors. The results suggest that higher levels of religiosity are negatively associated with the usage and adoption of formal financial services, both across U.S. states and across different countries. To explore possible causal implications, we exploit spatial variations in historical pathogen prevalence as the main instrument of our study.     

Mobile money adoption and households’ vulnerability to shocks: Evidence from Togo

ABSTRACT

We investigate the determinants of mobile money adoption process and whether its use helps households in Togo to be resilient to predictable and unpredictable life events. Using ordered logit and sequential logit models, our results show that in the adoption process, households benefit from weak ties of social groups such as religious group and informal saving group for the adoption of mobile money. We equally find that being client of banks or microfinance institutions act as powerful channels from one step to another in the process. Besides, our findings reveal that households whoever use mobile money seem to be more resilient to climatic shocks such as drought, irregular rain, soil degradation, erosion and fertility reduction and to shock that affect households’ assets (non-climatic: high prices of agricultural inputs). However, the picture is more contrasted when the individuals are classified by disadvantaged groups such as rural people, women, less educated and people with low incomes.     

Prediction of bank financial strength ratings: The case of Turkey

Bank financial strength ratings have gained widespread popularity especially after the recent financial turmoil. Rating agencies were criticized because of their ratings and failure to predict the bankruptcy of the banks. Based on this observation, we investigate whether the forecast of the rating of bank's financial strength using publicly available data is consistent with those of the credit rating agency. We use the data of Turkish banks for this investigation. We take a country-specific approach because previous studies found that proxies used for environmental factors (political, economic, and financial risk of the country) did not have any explanatory power and it is hard to find international data for other important factors such as franchise value, concentration, and efficiency. We use two popular multivariate statistical techniques (multiple discriminant analysis and ordered logistic regression) to estimate a suitable model and we compare their performances with those of two mostly used data mining techniques (Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Network). Our results suggest that our predictions are consistent with those of Moody's financial strength rating in general.. The important factors in rating are found to be profitability (measured by return on equity), efficient use of resources, and funding the businesses and the households instead of the government that shows efficient placement of the funds.     

Does financial inclusion empower women in Africa?

This paper examines the effect of financial inclusion on women's empowerment. We contribute to the growing interest in financial inclusion effectiveness literature by conducting an empirical analysis of 42 African countries to examine the role of financial inclusion in empowering women. We also examine and compare the effectiveness of the three dimensions of financial inclusion viz. usage, access, and quality, and the first most influential indicators, based on their PCA score, of these dimensions. Our findings suggest that financial inclusion has a significantly positive effect on women's empowerment-measured by females' human development index. Examining the relative importance of financial inclusion dimensions, we find access to financial services has a higher effect on women's empowerment. These results are robust to alternative measures of women's empowerment and financial inclusion, and alternative estimation procedures. We also find that the effect of financial inclusion on women's empowerment is higher in low and lower-middle-income countries compared with upper-middle-income countries in the region. This study provides evidence of one of the channels through which financial inclusion contributes to reducing gender inequality, and thereby enhancing economic development.     

A few observations on financial liberalization and financial instability

Recent studies have conjectured that there may be a link between financial liberalization (FL) and financial instability in emerging economies. Most of these studies, however, do not investigate whether emerging economies are, in fact, becoming structurally more vulnerable to currency and banking crises. In this paper, I argue that emerging economies are becoming more susceptible to both currency and banking crises after FL. Using data for 27 emerging economies—excluding transition economies—from 1973 to the present, a univariate analysis indicates that the likelihood of currency crises may increase with stronger reactions to financial variables than to real or external trade variables. Similarly, for banking crises, interest rate, exchange rate, maturity, and default may increase, while simultaneously the support structure of the government seems to decline.     

Does religious faith affect household financial market participation? Evidence from China

Based on the 2013 China Household Finance Survey data, this paper investigates the impact of religious faith on household financial market participation and portfolio choice. The results show that religious faith can significantly promote household financial market participation. Besides, religious faith can increase the proportion of risky assets held by households, including equities. We also find that the need for social interaction and human capital accumulation can significantly induce religious residents to participate in financial markets and hold risky assets. Overall, our results reveal how faith affects household finance activities in China.     

Financial market frictions in a model of the Euro area

We build a model of the euro area incorporating financial market frictions at the level of firms and households. Entrepreneurs borrow from financial intermediaries in order to purchase business capital, in the spirit of the “financial accelerator” literature. We also introduce two types of households that differ in their degree of time preference. All households have preferences for housing services. The impatient households are faced with a collateral constraint that is a function of the value of their housing stock. Our aim is to provide a unified framework for policy analysis that emphasises financial market frictions alongside the more traditional model channels. The model is estimated by Bayesian methods using euro area aggregate data and model properties are illustrated with simulation and conditional variance and historical shock decomposition.     

Monetary policy with heterogeneous agents and borrowing constraints

We show that the long-run neutrality of inflation on capital accumulation obtained in complete market models no longer holds when households face binding credit constraints. Borrowing-constrained households are not able to rebalance their financial portfolio when inflation varies, and thus adjust their money holdings differently compared to unconstrained households. This heterogeneity leads to a new precautionary savings motive, which implies that inflation increases capital accumulation. We quantify the importance of this new channel in an incomplete market model where the traditional redistributive effects of inflation are also introduced. We show that this model provides a quantitative rationale for the observed hump-shaped relationship between inflation and capital accumulation.     

Effects of remittances on financial inclusion gender gap in developing countries

Remittances have a wide range of benefits to households and the economy at large. Evidence show that women are the major recipients of remittances in developing countries, consequently this may have the potential of reducing the gender gap in economic outcomes. This study examines the impact of remittances on gender gap in financial inclusion in developing countries. The dataset for the study was built from multiple sources. Based on data availability, the study covers 102 developing countries for three years, namely 2011, 2014 and 2017. The study employs fixed effects instrumental variable technique using the economic conditions of the top five remittance sending countries (proxied by their GDP per capita and employment rate) as instruments. For robustness purpose different measurements of remittances are used in the analysis. Though the study does not provide evidence that remittances impact the overall inequality in access to financial services, the results show that remittances significantly reduce the gender gap in financial inclusion in developing countries. Based on these findings, the study makes appropriate policy recommendations.     

Reciprocity in financial decision making: intuitive and analytical mind-reading strategies

In financial games requiring to take into account the reciprocal benefits, mind-reading—that is, trying to identify other people’s thoughts—is involved. Mind-reading may occur through either analytical or intuitive strategies. Two studies were carried out to deepen the role of analytical and intuitive modes of thinking in mind-reading in financial decision making. Employing the Ultimatum Game as a setting suitable for researching into these topics, we found that the sums of money offered by undergraduates were modulated depending both on the psychological portraits of the responders and on the two modes of thinking. Specifically we found that the sums of money the undergraduates offered varied consistently across the two studies according to specific responder’s psychological features such as honesty, sense of justice, personal dignity. As for the two modes of thinking, it turned out that in the intuitive task proposers offered larger amount of money than in the analytical task.     

Monetary policy and efficiency in over‐the‐counter financial trade

We develop a monetary model that incorporates over‐the‐counter (OTC) asset trade. After agents have made their money holding decisions, they receive an idiosyncratic shock that affects their valuation for consumption and, hence, for the unique liquid asset, namely money. Subsequently, agents can choose whether they want to enter the OTC market in order to sell assets and thus boost their liquidity or to buy assets and thus provide liquidity to other agents. In our model, inflation affects not only the money holding decisions of agents, as is standard in monetary theory, but also the entry decision of these agents in the financial market. We use our framework to study the effect of inflation on welfare, asset prices and OTC trade volume. In contrast to most monetary models, which predict a negative relationship between inflation and welfare, we find that inflation can be welfare improving within a certain range, because it mitigates a search externality that agents impose on one another when they make their OTC market entry decision. Also, an increase in the holding cost of money will lead to a decrease in asset prices, a regularity that is well documented in the data and often considered anomalous.     

Conjoint analysis of demand for IP telephony: the case of Japan

With the recent diffusion of broadband (BB) services, Internet protocol (IP) telephony is expected to spread significantly in Japan. This article investigates the demand for IP telephony by using conjoint analysis. Projecting IP telephony demand also contributes to Japanese info-communication policy discussions. Two points are made. First, IP telephony is still currently considered an optional supplement or an add-on service option of high-speed BB Internet access services in Japan rather than a close substitute of existing plain old telephone service (POTS). At this point, we find little evidence that many households will promptly forsake their fixed line service for IP telephony. Second, we conclude that the key condition for the proliferation of IP telephony is the complete guarantee of quality of service (QoS), including voice quality, number portability, fax usage and emergency access, comparable to or exceeding that of existing POTS.     

Longitudinal evidence on financial expectations in Albania

This article focuses on the effect of remittances on financial expectations in Albania using longitudinal data covering the period 2002–2004. To study the dynamics of income satisfaction at the household level, we use subjective data on past, current and future financial situations and estimate random and fixed effect ordered Probit models. We find that households are more optimistic about the future when they have experienced an improvement in their financial situation in the past and when they have received private transfers from foreign countries.     

National culture and financial literacy: international evidence

ABSTRACT

We examine to what extent (aspects of) national culture can explain cross-country variations in financial literacy. Our results, for a sample of 92 countries, show that Hofstede’s dimensions of power distance and individualism explain, respectively, over 40 and 60 per cent – which is substantially more than national cognitive scores and standard economic variables. In particular, we find that financial literacy is lower in countries where power distance is high, and that the opposite is true for individualism. Uncertainty avoidance would seem be negatively related with financial literacy, but the evidence is not so strong. For masculinity, indulgence, and long-term orientation we find no significant impact. Overall, our results highlight the need for additional (interdisciplinary) theories that can improve our understanding of the determinants of financial literacy and better guide policies in this area.     

The impact of FDI on host countries: the analysis of selected service industries in the Visegrad countries

Foreign direct investments are substantial in the services sector in the Visegrad countries. In this article, we analyse the impact of FDI on the host economy in four selected service industries in two areas: export and employment. FDI in the four selected service industries differ in terms of their vertical or horizontal nature: in business services FDI is predominantly vertical; in financial services and telecommunications it is predominantly horizontal; while in computer-related service activities both types can be found. According to our results, the impact on the host economy differs in the four service industries. We found a positive and significant impact on exports in vertical business services and in horizontal telecommunications services, and on employment in business services and, to a lesser extent, in financial services. The positive impact either diminished or disappeared during the global recession of 2008–2009. The comparison of the four Visegrad countries demonstrates the heterogeneous intensity and significance of this impact, indicating their different specialisations in the analysed services industries.     

Climate threshold,financial hoarding and economic growth

We use an iterative finite difference method to establish theoretical models that reflect the relationships among climate threshold, financial hoarding and economic growth. We build a simultaneous equations model to conduct an empirical analysis based on China’s statistical data from 1979 to 2012. Our study yields the following results: China’s climate threshold has shown a zigzag-shaped rising trend since 1979; the main reasons for the rapid expansion of financial hoarding were high savings rate, savings leakage, higher marginal efficiency of financial hoarding compared to capital efficiency or higher internal creativity of the financial sector; there were positive cumulative effects between financial hoarding and economic growth, which were significantly inhibited by climate threshold; the climate threshold had discrepant influences on different industries. To achieve a balanced economy, more money should be invested in the real sector to appropriately reduce the rate of savings leakage; the financial sector should move from scale expansion to service efficiency improvements to increase its marginal contribution to the economy and to enhance capital efficiency; the real sector should improve technological innovation and speed up the adaptive adjustment in climate-sensitive industries to move from economic growth to advanced development.