Interactions between Institutional and Informal Credit Agencies in Rural India

In an attempt to expand rural credit and displace the villagemoneylender, India created a system of rural cooperatives inthe 1950s and expanded branch banking into rural areas in the1970s. This article examines how these measures affected therural market. It begins with the question of how large the expansionof institutional credit has been and the extent to which ithas dislodged the village and nonresident moneylenders. A detailedcomparison of three major surveys of the Indian rural creditmarket suggests that in various guises, the moneylender is stilla major source of loans. The article also examines the (weak)evidence on intermediation between the formal and informal sectors.A formal model of the interaction between the informal moneylenderand institutional lender is constructed under a variety of assumptionsabout the exclusivity of loan contracts and the competitivestructure of the informal sector. The conclusions are drawntogether in the form of five proposals for public policy.     

Energy,environment and the rural poor in South Africa

The lack of adequate energy services imposes heavy social and environmental costs on poor rural households. The rural energy‐environment interface, however, is prone to oversimplistic analyses, especially in the case of the ‘fuelwood problem’, and to a lack of research. International experience suggests that deforestation is not necessarily an ‘energy problem’ resulting from the cutting of trees for fuelwood ‐ and therefore that it may not have an energy solution, like planting more trees for firewood. Instead, wood scarcity must be understood under multiple use of wood resources, and policies need to be multifaceted if they are to succeed. South African studies show that wood is becoming increasingly scarce in many areas; here fuelwood collection may contribute to deforestation more than suggested by international experience. In addition to the environmental effects of increasing wood scarcity and its social costs, borne largely by women, another serious problem arises from indoor air pollution caused by wood fires with social and health costs largely unaccounted for to date.     

Management control in the transfer pricing tax compliant multinational enterprise

This paper studies the impact of transfer pricing tax compliance on management control system (MCS) design and use within one multinational enterprise (MNE) which employed the same transfer prices for tax compliance and internal management purposes. Our analysis shows immediate effects of tax compliance on the design of organising controls with subsequent effects on planning, evaluating and rewarding controls which reveal a more coercive use of the MCS overall. We argue that modifications to the MCS cannot be understood without an appreciation of the MNEs’ fiscal transfer pricing compliance process.     

Evaluation of global models

Complicated and sophisticated global models are available and popularly used (but commonly without model evaluation procedures), and hence, the question of how one can evaluate a global model is worth being investigated. We discuss whether or not these global models together can be fully utilized and, if so, how this might be achieved.     

Long-term forecasting and evaluation

Looking ahead thirty years is a difficult task, but is not impossible. In this paper we illustrate how to evaluate such long-term forecasts. Long-term forecasting is likely to be dominated by trend curves, particularly the simple linear and exponential trends. However, there will certainly be breaks in their parameter values at some unknown points, so that eventually the forecasts will be unsatisfactory. We investigate whether or not simple methods of long-run forecasting can ever be successful, after one takes into account the uncertainty level associated with the forecasts.     

The company you keep: Qualitative uncertainty in providing a club good

Clubs are typically experience goods. Potential members cannot ascertain precisely beforehand their quality (dependent endogenously on the club's facility investment and number of users, itself dependent on its prices). Members with unsatisfactory initial experiences discontinue visits. We show that a monopoly profit maximizer never offers a free trial period for such goods. For quality functions homogeneous of degree of at least minus one, a welfare maximizer, motivated by distributional concerns to mitigate disappointed consumers' losses, always does. We demonstrate the robustness of this finding by showing that (i) without qualitative uncertainty (thus, no disappointed customers), neither welfarist nor monopolist offers free trials; and (ii) if the planner pursues an objective mixing welfare maximization with profit maximization, the likelihood of free trials increases with the weight put on welfare maximization. Regarding club quality and usage, the monopolist provides a socially excessive level of quality to repeat buyers when the quality function is homogeneous of degree zero. With nonhomogeneous quality functions, the monopolist permits too little club usage; quality may or may not be socially excessive.     

The impact of share price on seasonality and size anomalies in Australian equity returns

Given the high correlation between a firm's stock price and market capitalisation, it is possible that the well-documented size anomaly is masking a share-price effect. Using a seemingly unrelated regression model to accommodate contemporaneous correlation between portfolios, we estimate the separate effects of firm size and share price on returns to Australian equity portfolios. The analysis is also extended to estimate seasonal components of size and price effects. Our major findings are: (i) firm size and share price have significant and independent effects on portfolio returns averaged over all months, (ii) the familiar negative relation between size and returns is confirmed across all months, and (iii) the relation between share price and returns is negative in July and positive in all other months (with the exception of January where no price effect occurs). These findings, which are consistent across sub-periods and robust to method variations, highlight the need for future research to provide an economic foundation for the relation between average returns, size and price.     

Older Female Workers in Britain and its Regions Millennium prospects

In the context of demographic and workforce ageing, this paper examines the participation of older females in the labour market. While there has been increasing interest in lower employment rates amongst older males, little attention has been paid to older females. The paper reviews some of the determinants of female participation rates. It then moves on to explore issues and policies associated with education, training and learning; age discrimination and equal opportunities; and pensions and benefits. In conclusion, a suggested research agenda - providing information to help guide the formulation and implementation of policy - is outlined.     

Outline of forecast theory using generalized cost functions

The cost functions used to form forecasts in practice may be quite different than the squared costs that is often assumed in forecast theory. The impact on evaluation procedures is determined and simple properties for the derivate of the cost function of the errors are found to provide simple tests of optimality. For a very limited class of situations are forecasts based on conditional means optimal, generally, the econometricians needs to provide the whole conditional predicted distribution. Implications for multi-step forecasts and the combination of forecasts are briefly considered.