Scope economies from rural and urban microfinance services

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) operate in both rural and urban credit markets and provide financial services to the poor not served by commercial banks. MFIs must keep operating costs low to better serve their clients. We evaluate whether MFIs can lower their costs by exploiting economies of diversification from serving both rural and urban markets rather than specializing in only one. We apply a novel method to estimate scope economies that minimizes the well-known “excessive extrapolation” and accommodates MFIs' heterogeneity. Analyzing panel data on MFIs from 105 countries over 2008–2018, we find that about half of loan-only MFIs benefited from diversification and enjoyed scope economies of 16.6% while over two thirds of savings-and-loan MFIs experienced scope diseconomies of 11.7% suggesting advantages from specialization. Over time, the declining magnitudes and the prevalence of scope (dis)economies in both groups suggest that loan-only MFIs have been able to serve costlier marginal clients while savings-and-loan MFIs have been learning and decreasing their scope diseconomies. Stakeholders encouraging the transformation of MFIs into regulated savings-and-loan institutions that serve both rural and urban markets should be aware of the presence of scope diseconomies for that business type and offer adequate support.     

Systemic liquidity contagion in the European interbank market

Systemic liquidity risk, defined by the International Monetary Fund as “the risk of simultaneous liquidity difficulties at multiple financial institutions,” is a key topic in financial stability studies and macroprudential policy-making. In this context, the complex web of interconnections of the interbank market plays the crucial role of allowing funding liquidity shortages to propagate between financial institutions. Here, we introduce a simple yet effective model of the interbank market in which liquidity shortages propagate through an epidemic-like contagion mechanism on the network of interbank loans. The model is defined by using aggregate balance sheet information of European banks, and it exploits country and bank-specific risk features to account for the heterogeneity of financial institutions. Moreover, in order to obtain the European-wide topology of the interbank network, we define a block reconstruction method based on the exchange flows between the various countries. We show that the proposed contagion model is able to estimate systemic liquidity risk across different years and countries. Results suggest that our effective contagion approach can be successfully used as a viable alternative to more realistic but complicated models, which not only require more specific balance sheet variables with high time resolution but also need assumptions on how banks respond to liquidity shocks.

     

Forward-Looking Belief Elicitation Enhances Intergenerational Beneficence

Environmental and Resource Economics - One of the challenges in managing the Earth’s common pool resources, such as a livable climate or the supply of safe drinking water, is to motivate...