A Review of Institutional Alternatives to Collateralized Lending

Abstract: Rural producers’ access to formal finance has often been limited by their inability to provide collaterals, particularly in the form of registered or certified land titles and tenancy contracts or assets which are auctionable as well as by laws that make foreclosure difficult. This paper reviews some of the alternative institutional arrangements (possibilities) for reducing and overcoming collateral requirements such as third party guarantees, ownership of tradeable assets, credit guarantee schemes, group lending, credit‐savings linkages, incremental and loan repayment‐dependent lending, portfolio diversification and an efficient legal system for contract enforcement. It also specifies the land policy and tenure reforms that are desirable, especially in the direction of formal land titling or legally specified rights to the use and ownership of lands, the consolidation of land holdings and the provision of proper cadastres for land and assuring that titles are secure.     

Approximation approach for the performance analysis of production lines under a kanban discipline

In a JIT production environment, pull-type control systems are usually implemented to reduce the lead time and to synchronize the production rate with the demand rate. The design of an effective production control system requires easy and reliable approaches for evaluating the effect of the major system parameters on its performance.In this paper we model the kanban control system of a manufacturing line as a Markov process. In addition, we develop an approximation approach to the model that permits reliable evaluation of manufacturing system performance in terms of throughput time and work-in-process. The validation of the approach is implemented by comparing the exact results (based on discrete event simulation) and the approximated results.A good approximation is observed for a large range of conditions.     

On the vulnerability of the oil and gas industry to oil price changes

Previous studies of oil-price economic activity relationships are dominated by macro-level examination of price effects. This study examines the effect of shocks in oil price and its volatility on the oil and gas extraction industry using a Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) approach. The results show that, in the short-run, positive price and volatility shocks lead to significant increases in oil and gas activities. However, in the long-run, the industry behaves much like the rest of the U.S. economy—price and volatility shocks produce small or insignificant effects. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 22 ^nd Annual North American Conference of the U.S.A. Energy Economics/International Association of Energy Economics Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia. The authors acknowledge the editorial assistance of Versa Stickle.     

Rates of Return on Housing of Low-and Moderate-Income Owners

While long-term returns to capital invested in owner-occupied housing have been competitive with other investment alternatives, no evidence exists on the market performance of the owner-occupied housing in which low- and moderate-income households would be most likely to invest. This article thus attempts to answer the question of whether the "affordable housing units" that are relevant to policy discussions concerning low- and moderate-income homeownership have experienced different rates of price appreciation than have higher valued dwellings. The national file of the American Housing Survey is used to estimate appreciation rates by value class in representative U.S. housing markets. We find that for the period 1974 through 1983 appreciation rates for lower valued housing were generally about equal to those for higher valued housing.