women leaders and social performance evidence from financial cooperatives in senegal how do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the social performance of organizations this paper addresses the question by exploiting a unique database from a senegalese network of 36 financial cooperatives we scrutinize the loan granting decisions made jointly by the locally elected board and the top manager assigned by the central union of the network our findings are threefold first female dominated boards favor social orientation second female managers tend to align their strategy with local boards preferences third the central union tends to assign male managers to female dominated boards probably to curb the boards social orientation

the gender asset gap land in latin america summary the gender asset gap in latin america with respect to ownership of land is significant in few countries do women constitute even one quarter of the landowners gender inequality in land ownership is related to male preference in inheritance male privilege in marriage male bias in community and state programs of land distribution as well as gender bias in the land market with women less likely than men to be successful buyers but there are also important di erences by gender in how land is acquired inheritance is the primary means by which most women become landowners men are much more likely than women to acquire land through its distribution by communities or the state and via the market factors contributing toward a trend toward greater gender equity in land inheritance and in recent state programs are highlighted 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

board size and diversity as governance mechanisms in community development loan funds in the usa community development loan funds cdlfs in the us help revitalize low income communities by providing financial services to underserved populations this article uses recently available data from several surveys to explore the link between performance and board size and diversity given the unique nature of cdlfs specific hypotheses are formulated based on insights from the literature on governance in banks and nonprofit institutions to capture the cdlfs multiple objectives the article adapts an empirical approach used to study governance in banks the results show that efficiency improves as the board size increases up to 13 members the results also suggest that gender diversity has a positive impact while racial diversity is associated with a negative but negligibly small impact

women s property rights and gendered policies implications for women s long term welfare in rural tanzania this paper evaluates effects of community level women s property and inheritance rights on women s economic outcomes using a 13 year longitudinal panel from rural tanzania in the preferred model specification inverse probability weighting is applied to a woman level fixed effects model to control for individual level time invariant heterogeneity and attrition results indicate that changes in women s property and inheritance rights are significantly associated with women s employment outside the home self employment and earnings results are not limited to sub groups of marginalised women findings indicate lack of gender equity in sub saharan africa may inhibit economic development for women and society as a whole

scale economies and input price elasticities in microfinance institutions abstract we evaluate the efficiency of microfinance institutions mfis using a structural approach which also captures these institutions outreach and sustainability objectives we estimate economies of scale and input price elasticities for lending only and deposit mobilizing mfis using a large sample of high quality panel data the results confirm conjectures that improvements in efficiency can come from the growth or consolidations of mfis as we find substantial increasing returns to scale for all but profitability focused deposit mobilizing mfis our results support the existence of a trade off between outreach and sustainability all inputs are inelastic substitutes but we find differences in own price elasticities in lending only and deposit mobilizing mfis

gender differences in the allocation of assets in retirement savings plans in 1995 40 percent of working men and 32 percent of working women were covered by a defined contribution dc plan a distinguishing characteristic of these plans is that workers can generally choose how their assets are invested using data from the 1992 and 1995 surveys of consumer finances scf this paper examines whether workers differ systematically by gender in the allocation of assets in dc plans previous researchers have reported that many workers tend to invest their retirement assets too conservatively and in particular that women are less likely than men to invest in risky assets such as stocks in the presence of an equity premium a lower propensity by women to invest in stocks could translate into large differences in the accumulation of financial wealth for retirement we establish that gender differences in investment decisions exist though they are more complicated than previous studies have suggested we show that these differences are not completely explained by differences in individual or household characteristics a few studies have examined gender differences in investment decisions vickie l bajtelsmit and jack l vanderhei 1997 richard p hinz et al 1997 these studies use administrative data and report that women tend to invest their retirement funds in less risky vehicles than men michael haliassos and carol c bertaut 1995 use the 1983 scf to examine why such a large fraction of households do not own any stock they report that gender does not have a significant effect on the probability of owning stock though gender differences are not the focus of their paper what these data sources lack haliassos and bertaut being the exception is a rich set of demographic and other variables on households that theory predicts should affect investment behavior this paper adds to the literature by examining gender differences in investment decisions conditioning on such variables the results highlight the importance of including marital status risk aversion measures and the portfolio of assets held outside dc plans when examining gender differences in investment decisions in these plans

economies of scope of lending and mobilizing deposits in microfinance institutions a semiparametric analysis microfinance emerged as an innovation in lending to the rural poor in asia and in response to frequent failure of previous interventions in rural financial markets such as directed and subsidized production credit disbursed by agricultural development banks while it started as a collection of banking practices built around providing small loans typically without collateral and accepting tiny savings deposits armendariz de aghion and morduch 2005 p 1 today many microfinance institutions mfis expand their services and strive to offer payment and savings facilities insurance housing and longer term loans to marginalized clientele in rural and urban settings estimates show that there are at least 10 000 microfinance programs worldwide two related and important trends are now emerging the first is toward commercialization which essentially is transforming ngo mfis into regulated intermediaries with the intent to lower costs by accessing deposits as well as strengthen the organizations by privatization the second trend is a renewed interest in experimentation to mobilize savings with emphasis on rural savings economies of scope imply that expansion into the savings market can be more cost efficient if done by the same mfis which makes it a significant factor in assessing the feasibility of these innovations however there are few studies that estimate the magnitude and sign of scope economies in this paper we present some preliminary evidence on scope economies using a large sample of mfis

women empowerment and economic development women empowerment and economic development are closely related in one direction development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women in the other direction empowering women may benefit development does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion this paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment development nexus and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self sustaining and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women

performance and governance in microfinance institutions accepted version of article published in the journal journal of banking finance published version available on science direct http dx doi org 10 1016 j jbankfin 2008 11 009

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

the influence of management characteristics on the technical efficiency of wheat farmers in eastern england technical efficiency of wheat farms in eastern england is measured through the estimation of a stochastic frontier production function using panel data for the 1993 1997 crop years variations in the technical efficiency index across production units are explained through a number of managerial and farm characteristic variables following battese and coelli 1995 empirical econ 20 325 332 and incorporating the spirit of rougoor et al 1998 agric econ 18 261 272 the technical efficiency index across production units ranges from 62 to 98 the objectives of maximising annual profits and maintaining the environment are positively correlated with and have the largest influence on technical efficiency moreover those farmers who seek information have more years of managerial experience and have a large farm are also associated with higher levels of technical efficiency future studies that seek to explain variation in technical efficiency should include further aspects of the managerial decision making process

managers and efficiency in banking abstract this paper presents evidence on the impact of managers on cost efficiency in banking stochastic frontier analysis is applied to a unique finnish data set manager age and education have strong yet complicated effects on efficiency the impact of age on efficiency depends on education a university degree is useful mainly in the largest banks of the sample educational background seems to be less important for young managers than for mature ones managing director changes are systematically followed by efficiency changes retirement typically causes an efficiency improvement whereas other manager changes can either improve or weaken efficiency however in many cases mature managers outperform their young colleagues

portfolio choice and trading in a large 401 k plan we study nearly 7 000 retirement accounts during the april 1994 august 1998 period several interesting patterns emerge most asset allocations are extreme either 100 percent or zero percent in equities and there is inertia in asset allocations equity allocations are higher for males married investors and for investors with higher earnings and more seniority on the job equity allocations are lower for older investors there is very limited portfolio reshuffling in sharp contrast to discount brokerage accounts daily changes in equity allocations correlate only weakly with same day equity returns and do not correlate with future equity returns

gender differences in marketing styles recent research has found that men trade stocks more frequently than women and receive a lower price as a result the behavioral finance literature attributes this greater trading activity to men s overconfidence women s lack of overconfidence and past agricultural economics research suggest the possibility that women may be better at marketing grain than men this article uses actual transactions of farmers marketing wheat and also finds that men trade more often than women women also sell two weeks later in the marketing year there is no direct effect of gender on price received but by storing longer women receive 1 4 cents bushel less than men on average in contrast to the arguments in previous research we argue that men s greater number of trades can be better explained by men enjoying trading rather than by overconfidence

rural women s access to credit market imperfections and intrahousehold dynamics summary credit rationing studies carried out at the household level and based on responses from male heads of households present an incomplete and biased assessment of who is likely to be constrained why they are constrained and what is the extent of the constraints they ignore possibly conflictive intrahousehold dynamics and assume that imperfections in rural financial markets are gender neutral this paper addresses both issues theoretically and empirically the semi cooperative household model developed for this analysis formalizes the conditions under which spouses and particularly women s individual access to credit can be affected by their own position in the financial market as well as by intrahousehold dynamics these notions are then explored empirically using husbands and wives individual perceptions of their access to credit in rural paraguay the most significant empirical findings of the paper are that i compared to men women are more likely to be credit constrained ii women s rationing status responds to a different set of factors than men s and iii husbands may choose not to intermediate capital to their wives even when they are able to do so results from this exercise provide empirically sound support for the assumptions underlying women targeted credit programs

why do people keep their promises an experimental test of two explanations numerous psychological and economic experiments have shown that the exchange of promises greatly enhances cooperative behavior in experimental games this paper seeks to test two theories to explain this effect the first posits that individuals have a preference for keeping their word the second assumes that people dislike letting down others payoff expectations according to the latter account promises affect behavior only indirectly because they lead to changes in the payoff expectations attributed to others i conduct an experiment designed to distinguish between and test these alternative explanations the results demonstrate that the effects of promises cannot be accounted for by changes in payoff expectations this suggests that people have a preference for promise keeping per se

determinants of the performance of microfinance institutions a systematic review microfinance institutions mfis generally aim at improving the access of the poor to financial services while at the same time being financially sustainable but what do we know about how mfis reach and combine these two goals we carry out a systematic review of close to 170 papers discussing the determinants of the financial and social performance of mfis the review shows that the most important determinants addressed in the literature are mfi characteristics size age and type of organization their funding sources the quality of organizational governance and the mfis external context such as macro economic institutional and political conditions the evidence on these issues is rather mixed moreover the direction of the relationship between these drivers and mfi performance depends on the context particularly the country specific context finally there is a lack of consensus in the literature on the measurement of financial and social performance due to the complexity of the concept we argue that social performance should only be assessed by using a multidimensional perspective this can be done either by applying recent and holistic social performance measures such as the spi4 or at least by using a combination of proxies such as outreach gender and rural measures

the indirect energy consumption and co2 emission caused by household consumption in china an analysis based on the input output method in recent decades china s rapid economy development has been coupling with the steadily increasing household consumption which in turn leads to ever growing energy consumption and co2 emission with a focus on the decade of 2000 2010 this study examines the energy consumption and co2 emission caused by household consumption using the input output method as well as the influencing factors of the indirect co2 emission the results show that first the indirect energy consumption and co2 emission appear the main parts of total energy consumption and co2 emission caused by household consumption accounting for 69 77 and 77 84 respectively second the indirect co2 emission indicates an increasing trend mainly driven by per capita household consumption and energy intensity finally the five sectors with relatively higher direct or total co2 emission intensity are the key sectors for reducing co2 emission in china i e 1 production and distribution of electric power and heat power pdeh 2 smelting and pressing of metals spm 3 processing of petroleum coking processing of nuclear fuel ppcpn 4 manufacture of non metallic mineral products mnm and 5 manufacture of chemical materials mcm

frontier estimation and firm specific inefficiency measures in the presence of heteroscedasticity the purpose of this article is to illustrate a straightforward and useful method for addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in the estimation of frontiers a heteroscedastic cost frontier model is developed and estimated using bank cost data similar to that used by ferrier and lovell our results show dramatic changes in the estimated cost frontier and in the inefficiency measures when accounting for heteroscedasticity in the estimation process we find that the rankings of firms by their inefficiency measures is affected markedly by the correction for heteroscedasticity but not by alternative distributional assumptions about the one sided error term

biases in frontier estimation due to heteroscedasticity abstract this paper investigates the effects of heteroscedasticity on the parameters in frontier regression models a monte carlo experiment is employed to determine that heteroscedasticity leads to overestimation of the intercept and underestimation of the slope coefficients

women and repayment in microfinance a global analysis notice this is the author s version of a work that was accepted for publication in world development changes resulting from the publishing process such as peer review editing corrections structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication a definitive version was subsequently published in world development 39 5 758 772 http dx doi org 10 1016 j worlddev 2010 10 008

how loan portfolio diversification affects risk efficiency and capitalization a managerial behavior model for austrian banks abstract the aim of this paper is to analyze how diversification of banks across size and industry affects risk cost and profit efficiency and bank capitalization for large austrian commercial banks over the years 1997 2003 employing a unique dataset provided by the austrian central bank we test for several different types of managerial hypotheses formalized according to a modified version of the berger and deyoung model berger a n deyoung r 1997 problem loans and cost efficiency in commercial banks journal of banking and finance 21 849 870 we find that although diversification negatively affects cost efficiency it increases profit efficiency and reduces banks realized risk finally diversification seems to have a positive impact on banks capitalization

incomplete information models of guilt aversion in the trust game in the theory of psychological games it is assumed that players preferences on material consequences depend on endogenous beliefs most of the applications of this theoretical framework assume that the psychological utility functions representing such preferences are common knowledge however this is often unrealistic in particular it cannot be true in experimental games where players are subjects drawn at random from a population therefore an incomplete information methodology is needed we take a first step in this direction focusing on guilt aversion in the trust game in our models agents have heterogeneous belief hierarchies we characterize equilibria where trust occurs with positive probability our analysis illustrates the incomplete information approach to psychological games and can help to organize experimental results in the trust game this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

are women better bankers to the poor evidence from rural microfinance institutions microfinance institutions mfis provide financial services to the poor and in many ways resemble both banks and non profit organizations many mfis target women because more women than men are poor especially in rural areas studies show that women manage money differently from men and have different leadership styles thus in credit unions and financial firms female and male managers achieve different results in microfinance gender diversity on the board of mfis is beneficial and loans authorized by female loan officers have lower default rates motivated by these findings we ask whether mfis with a female chief executive officer ceo are more efficient at serving the poor without jeopardizing financial sustainability we adapt the banking approach to managerial in efficiency to account for the outreach and sustainability goals of the mfis and evaluate whether mfis outreach efficiency differs by the gender of their respective ceos we estimate a stochastic frontier cost function using the battese coelli 1995 model and the true random effects estimators using panel data from over 250 mfis we find that mfis with female ceos have significantly higher outreach efficiency than mfis with male ceos similar results are found with a two step stochastic frontier approach overall the results suggest that promoting gender diversity at the top levels of mfi management is likely to have both social and financial benefits

which microfinance institutions are becoming more cost effective with time evidence from a mixture model italian speakers tend to stress the second component of german morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed to improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners own voices basically the method copies contours of f0 local speech rate and intensity from reference utterances of a german native speaker to the learners speech signals it also adds emphasis to the stress position in order to help the learners better recognise the correct pronunciation and identify their errors a perception test with german native speakers revealed that manipulated utterances significantly better reflect lexical stress than the corresponding original utterances thus two groups of italian learners of german were provided with different feedback during a training session one group with manipulated utterances in their individual voices and the other with correctly pronounced original utterances in the teacher s voice afterwards both groups produced the same sentences again and german native speakers judged the resulting utterances resynthesised stimuli especially with emphasised stress were found to be a more effective feedback than natural stimuli to learn the correct stress position since resynthesis was obtained without previous segmentation of the learners speech signals this technology could be effectively included in computer assisted language learning software

guilt in games a clear conscience is a good pillow why does this old proverb contain an insight the emotion of guilt holds a key psychologists report that the prototypical cause of guilt would be the infliction of harm loss or distress on a relationship partner roy baumeister arlene m stillwell and todd f heatherton 1994 245 june price tangney 1995 moreover guilt is unpleasant and may affect behavior to render the associated pangs counterfactual baumeister stillwell and heatherton state if people feel guilt for hurting their partners and for failing to live up to their expectations they will alter their behavior to avoid guilt in ways that seem likely to maintain and strengthen the relationship avoided guilt is the down of the sound sleeper s bolster how can guilt be modeled how are human interaction and economic outcomes influenced we offer a formal approach for providing answers start with an extensive game form which associates a monetary outcome with each end node say that player i lets player j down if as a result of i s choice of strategy j gets a lower monetary payoff than j expected to get before play started player i s guilt may depend on how much he lets j down player i s guilt may also depend on how much j believes i believes he lets j down we develop techniques to analyze equilibria when players are motivated in part by a desire to avoid guilt the intellectual home for our exercise is what has been called psychological game theory this framework originally developed by john geanakoplos david pearce and ennio stacchetti 1989 and recently extended by battigalli and dufwenberg 2005 henceforth b d allows players utilities to depend on beliefs about choices states of nature

chipping away at the glass ceiling gender spillovers in corporate leadership this paper examines the role of women helping women in corporate america using a merged panel of directors and executives for large u s corporations between 1997 and 2009 we find a positive association between the female share of the board of directors in the previous year and the female share among current top executives the relationship s timing suggests that causality runs from boards to managers and not the reverse this pattern of women helping women at the highest levels of firm leadership highlights the continued importance of a demand side glass ceiling in explaining the slow progress of women in business

self selection and the forecasting abilities of female equity analysts this paper investigates whether there are systematic differences between the forecasting style and abilities of female and male analysts and whether market participants recognize these differences my key conjecture is that only female analysts with superior forecasting abilities enter the profession due to a perception of discrimination in the analyst labor market consistent with this conjecture i find that female analysts issue bolder and more accurate forecasts and their accuracy is higher in market segments in which their concentration is lower further the stock market participants are aware of the male female skill