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.     

School competition and students’ entrepreneurial intentions: international evidence using historical Catholic roots of private schooling

School choice research mostly focuses on academic outcomes. Policymakers increasingly view entrepreneurial traits as a non-cognitive outcome important for economic growth. We use international PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students’ entrepreneurial intentions, measured by their occupational desire to manage a small enterprise. We exploit Catholic-Church resistance to state schooling in the 19th century as a natural experiment to obtain exogenous variation in current private-school shares. Our instrumental-variable results suggest that a 10%-point higher private-school share raises students’ entrepreneurial intentions by 0.3–0.5% points (11–18% of the international mean) even after controlling for current Catholic shares, students’ academic skills, and parents’ entrepreneurial occupation.     

山东省城市竞争力存在的问题与对策建议

全球经济一体化使城市在区域经济发展中的地位日益重要,城市之间的竞争日趋激烈。提高城市竞争力并发挥其作为区域发展的组织者角色,推动区域和国家经济的迅速增长,已被各级政府提上议事日程。基于以上认识,对山东城市竞争中存在的问题做出了较为全面的剖析,并提出提升山东城市整体竞争力水平的对策建议。     

地方政府利益、地方政府行为与经济增长

目前,对中国地方政府的经济行为的研究强调了在经济转型过程中地方政府在多样化的地方经济发展模式中的主导作用,注意到了地方政府目标的多重性,本地区社会福利最大化,政府利益最大化以及中央政府的满意程度等。对地方政府在公共产品的提供、就业、收入分配、实现社会公平等方面行为不到位方面的研究是从定性方法来论证。本文试图在定性分析基础上建立一些基本的数学模型为将来的计量研究提供一个模型框架。     

Downward wage rigidity and job mobility

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we study whether being individually affected by downward wage rigidity has an effect on layoffs, quits and intra-firm mobility. Within a structural empirical model we estimate the individual extent of wage rigidity. This is expressed by the wage sweep-up, which measures by how much individual wage growth increases through the effect of downward wage rigidity when compared to a counterfactual labour market with flexible wage setting. We find robust negative effects of wage sweep-up on quits and layoffs and some evidence for a positive association of wage sweep-up and promotion opportunities. This is consistent with a core-periphery view of the labour force, where a core work force is protected from layoffs and wage cuts and at the same time enjoys good promotion opportunities. On the other side a peripheral work force provides a buffer for adjustment and suffers from both flexible wages, more insecure jobs and less internal promotion opportunities.      

Market efficiency in the Spanish derivatives markets: An empirical analysis

This paper analyzes Granger caUSAlity between daily prices of the Spanish stock index (Ibex 35) and its futures contract using Johansen cointegration methodology. The study differentiates between short-run and long-run caUSAlity. The empirical results prove that, in the short run, the futures price causes the spot price. However, the opposite is not true. On the other hand, long-run caUSAlity is embodied in the response of futures prices after deviations from the long-run equilibrium. These results say that during the period of study, the Spanish futures market behaved as an efficient market.