the interest group theory of financial development in china openness and the role of interest groups the interest group theory of financial development predicts that the incumbents opposition to financial development will be weaker when an economy is open to both trade and capital flows based on regressions of financial development on trade and financial openness existing studies only provide indirect tests of the hypothesis and deliver mixed findings this paper proposes models for direct tests of interest group theory for china using chinese cross province data we define and measure interest groups based on the close tie between state owned enterprises and local government in china the empirical results show that the opposition from interest groups to financial development cannot be weakened in provinces with high trade or financial openness alone however the opposition is indeed weakened in provinces with high levels of both trade and financial openness these results provide robust support for interest group theory in accounting for cross province differences and time series variation in financial development in china

the politics of staying poor exploring the political space for poverty reduction in uganda summary despite claims that uganda s recent success in poverty reduction has been significantly related to getting the politics right there are concerns that the poorest may not have benefited from this form of poverty reduction or the types of politics that have helped shape it employing the analytical framework of political space reveals that although some of the poorest groups are represented within the political system political discourse reveals a strong bias toward the economically active leaving the poorest excluded from poverty programs significantly there is an increasing divergence between the regime s political project of modernization and the international poverty agenda with important implications for the poorest

financial development and barriers to the cross border diffusion of financial innovation this paper explores the determinants of financial development by focusing on the role played by barriers to the diffusion of financial technology these barriers are measured using human genetic distance from the technology frontier the results based on cross sectional data for 123 countries suggest that genetic distance to the global frontier has an economically and statistically significant effect on financial development in that countries that are genetically far from the technology leader tend to have lower levels of financial development genetic distance is found to have the largest effect even after controlling for other determinants of financial development established in the literature these findings indicate that cultural barriers to the diffusion of financial technology across borders impact financial development by influencing the follower countries ability to adopt and adapt innovations from the frontier

on the value of transparency in agencies with renegotiation in this paper we study when it is advantageous to improve corporate transparency by allowing shareholders direct access to corporate information and when it is preferable to rely on a reporting system in which shareholders only gain access to information that management chooses to disclose we show that in an agency model that allows for contract renegotiation the desirability of a fully transparent reporting regime hinges on the stewardship properties of the information in question specifically information that is mainly useful for predicting future events and of little use for evaluating past actions should only be made available to the public through management s self interested disclosures only if the information is useful for making inference about managerial actions can it be optimal to have full corporate transparency so that outsiders have independent access to the same information as management

currency misalignments and growth a new look using nonlinear panel data methods the aim of this article is to investigate the link between currency misalignments and economic growth relying on panel cointegration techniques we calculate real exchange rate rer misalignments as deviations of actual rers from their equilibrium values for a set of advanced and emerging economies estimating panel smooth transition regression pstr models we show that rer misalignments have a differentiated impact on economic growth depending on their sign whereas overvaluations negatively affect economic growth rer undervaluations significantly enhance it this result indicates that undervaluations may drive the exchange rate to a level that encourages exports and promotes growth

does deposit insurance retard the development of non bank financial markets whether and how the introduction of deposit insurance affects non bank financial market development depends on whether banks and non bank financial markets are substitutes or complements and theory has conflicting views using data on 134 countries over a 28 year period and several identification strategies we find that the introduction of deposit insurance retards the equity market the non bank depositaries sector and the banking sector when law and order is weak while strong law and order mitigates this effect it does not lead to a positive outcome for all markets for non bank financial markets the effect is greater in the long run so that while deposit insurance increases banking sector development in the long run it retards non bank financial markets regardless of the level of law and order finally several design features exacerbate the negative outcomes our results have important policy implications for implementing or altering deposit insurance schemes

what type of finance matters for growth bayesian model averaging evidence this paper examines the effect of finance on long term economic growth using bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty in cross country growth regressions the literature largely focuses on financial indicators that assess the financial depth of banks and stock markets these indicators are examined jointly with newly developed indicators that assess the stability and efficiency of financial markets once the finance growth regressions are subjected to model uncertainty the results suggest that commonly used indicators of financial development are not robustly related to long term growth however the findings from the global sample indicate that one newly developed indicator the efficiency of financial intermediaries is robustly related to long term growth

exploring the nexus between financial openness and informational efficiency does the quality of institution matter this article examines the empirical link between financial openness and informational efficiency of stock markets in 27 emerging markets improving on earlier papers this study has used world bank s worldwide governance indicators wgi as the proxy of institutional development in dynamic panel data models estimated by generalized method of moments gmm our results show first financial liberalization by itself has no impact on enhancing efficiency of stock market second for countries with high level of institutional development the interaction of trade openness and financial openness become significant third for the same group of countries interaction effect of financial liberalization and institutional development leads to more efficiency in stock market hence our finding demonstrates the utmost importance of institutional development and its role on liberalization our results conclude that institutional development and trade openness are pre requisites for a country to benefit from financi

tax evasion financial development and inflation theory and empirical evidence abstract using a standard overlapping generations monetary production economy faced with endogenously determined tax evasion by heterogeneous agents in the economy we provide a theoretical model that indicates that both a lower higher level of financial development and a higher lower level of inflation leads to a bigger smaller shadow economy these findings are empirically tested within a panel econometric framework using data collected for 150 countries over the period 1980 2009 to enable a broad generalisation of the results the results support the developed theoretical model even after having accounted for the differences in the levels of economic development the level of institutional quality that includes different tax regimes and regulatory frameworks central bank participation in the economy as well as different macroeconomic policies

dynamic incentives and retirement abstract this paper examines multi period compensation contracts when retirement is anticipated short term contracts in long term employment relationships are equivalent to a long term renegotiation proof contract the dynamic of incentive rates is determined by i how and in which periods managerial effort affects the contractible performance measures and by ii the time series correlation of error terms in performance reports the model explains why long term investments can decrease while incentive rates increase as managers approach retirement earnings persistence is negatively associated to earnings based incentive rates but towards retirement high earnings persistence implies increasing earnings based incentive rates

nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural africa concepts dynamics and policy implications abstract asset activity and income diversification lie at the heart of livelihood strategies in rural africa this paper introduces a special issue on the topic income diversification and livelihoods in rural africa cause and consequence of change we concentrate on core conceptual issues that bedevil the literature on rural income diversification and the policy implications of the empirical evidence presented in this special issue

escaping poverty and becoming poor in 36 villages of central and western uganda abstract twenty four per cent of households in 36 village communities of central and western uganda have escaped from poverty over the past 25 years but another 15 per cent have simultaneously fallen into poverty a roughly equal number of households escaped from poverty in the first period ten to 25 years ago as in the second period the last ten years examined here however almost twice as many households fell into poverty during the second period as in the first period progress in poverty reduction has slowed down as a result multiple causes are associated with descent into poverty and these causes vary significantly between villages in the two different regions for nearly two thirds of all households in both regions however ill health and health related costs were a principal reason for descent into poverty escaping poverty is also associated with diverse causes which vary across the two regions compared to increases in urban employment however land related reasons have been more import

the economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty an asset based approach abstract longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty while a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty this paper develops an asset based approach to poverty analysis that makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted persistent structural poverty from poverty that passes naturally with time due to systemic growth processes drawing on the economic theory of poverty traps and bifurcated accumulation strategies this paper briefly discusses some feasible estimation strategies for empirically identifying poverty traps and long term persistent structural poverty as well as relevant extensions of the popular foster greer thorbecke class of poverty measures the paper closes with reflections on how asset based poverty can be used to underwrite the design of persistent poverty reduction strategies

do changes in the labour market take families out of poverty determinants of exiting poverty in brazilian metropolitan regions using survival models we test whether short term changes in the labour market affect poverty duration data are from the brazilian monthly employment survey such a monthly dataset permits more accurate estimations of events than using annual data but its panel follows households for a short period then methods that control for both right and left censoring should be used the results are as follows households with zero income are not those with the lowest chances of exiting changes in aggregate unemployment do not affect poverty duration and increasing wages in the informal sector has a negative effect on poverty duration

on transparency in organizations when is it best for the principal to commit to not disclosing all that he she knows in moral hazard interactions i show that whenever the agent would choose the same action under complete information at several distinct states then full transparency can generically be improved upon this implies that full transparency is generically suboptimal whenever the dimension of the information held by the principal exceeds the dimension of the agent s action in a simple class of problems i make further progress on the best disclosure policy assuming the principal can either disclose fully the state or remain silent

do natural resource revenues hinder financial development the role of political institutions we hypothesize that natural resource revenues may deteriorate contract enforcement if political institutions are weak as poor contract enforcement leads to low financial development resource revenues may hinder financial development in countries with poor political institutions but not in countries with comparatively better political institutions we provide empirical support for this hypothesis based on within country variation in our sample covering the period 1970 2005 and 133 countries our results are robust to the use of additional control variables different samples and alternative measures of financial development and political institutions

pathways into and out of poverty a study of rural household wealth dynamics in kenya this study identifies the factors associated with smallholder farm households that have risen out of poverty or descended into poverty between 1997 and 2007 in kenya the study uses data from a nationwide balanced panel of 1 275 households and data from detailed retrospective life history survey of 84 households that had experienced either an appreciable improvement or decline in their asset wealth over the 10 year panel period the results indicate that household welfare dynamics are associated with a disparate set of idiosyncratic and unexpected shocks such as death and chronic illness demographic factors proximity to infrastructural facilities as well as intergenerational wealth transfers

the firm as a nexus of treaties part 1 knowledge its acquisition sharing and or asymmetry the participatory generation of information rents and the theory of the firm masahiko aoki common knowledge and the co ordination of economic activities jacques cremer profit sharing information and employment matti pohjola part 2 vertical integration and the strategic management of the enterprise what is vertical integration michael h riordan vertical integration transaction costs and learning by using kurt lundgren the firm as a nexus of internal and external contracts torger reve part 3 issues of labour organization the viability of worker ownership an economic perspective on the political structure of the firm henry hansmann intellectual skill and the role of employees as constituent members of large firms in contemporary japan kazuo koike the implicit contract for corporate law firm associates ex post opportunism and ex ante bonding robert h mooking part 4 finance and the political structure of the firm capital structure as a mechanism of control a comparison of financial systems erik berglof long term contracts in financial markets hakan lindgren the principle of external accountability in competitive markets herbert gintis union militancy and plant designs kar ove moene can transaction cost economics explain trade associations marc schneiberg and j rogers hollingsworth

the distributive impact of land markets in uganda abstract this article presents first hand evidence about land distribution and the impact of land markets in central uganda this area is characterized by unequal distribution of land inheritance rural rural migration and active land markets we show that land markets and particularly land purchases tend to reduce the initial inequality in the initial inherited distribution of land land purchases by landless farmers in their native village represent an important part of this adjustment

non commitment in performance evaluation and the problem of information distortions abstract auditing is modeled in a sequential game without commitment the manager must decide whether and where to audit a worker s output taking into account all interim information he has obtained the worker will work just hard enough and show it to divert the manager from making an audit or cover up withholding information about his work to make an audit more difficult this usually raises the costs of setting work incentives so incentives are softened sometimes drastically moreover when a worker s on the job information is valuable for entrepreneurial decisions work incentives must be softened to improve the internal flow of information

imprecision in accounting measurement can it be value enhancing accounting measurements of firms investments are usually imprecise we study the economic consequences of such imprecision when it interacts with information asymmetry regarding an investment project s ex ante profitability known only by the firm s managers absent agency and risk sharing considerations we find that some degree of accounting imprecision could actually be value enhancing we characterize the optimal degree of imprecision and identify its key determinants the greater the information asymmetry regarding the project s profitability the greater is the imprecision that should be tolerated in the measurement of the firm s investment

the mechanics of commercial banking liberalization and growth abstract this paper formalizes the effects of liberalization across the border of deposit taking and lending activities on the regime of competition in the banking market and on the rate of growth of the economy we extend two economy based deidda 2006 s banking model in which originally each economy hosts at least one operating bank we introduce two gats defined modes of commercial banking liberalization namely the commercial presence mode and the cross border mode additionally we introduce the possibility of strategic behavior by competing banks in equilibrium the extended model provides a causal link between the cost structure of the banking industry the regime of competition in the liberalized banking sector and the rate of growth of the economy under alternative modes of liberalization in particular we show a threshold effect in terms of economic development above certain economic development the banking sector operates competitively and supports an accelerating rate of growth generating a bidirectional self reinforcing link between commercial banking liberalization and growth the pace of growth is further increased with respect to a scenario where such behavior is not present by the presence of strategic behavior by competing banks in equilibrium

optimal auditing with scoring theory and application to insurance fraud this article makes a bridge between the theory of optimal auditing and the scoring methodology in an asymmetric information setting our application is meant for insurance claims fraud but it can be applied to many other activities that use the scoring approach fraud signals are classified based on the degree to which they reveal an increasing probability of fraud we show that the optimal auditing strategy takes the form of a red flags strategy which consists in referring claims to a special investigative unit siu when certain fraud indicators are observed the auditing policy acts as a deterrence device and we explain why it requires the commitment of the insurer and how it should affect the incentives of siu staffs the characterization of the optimal auditing strategy is robust to some degree of signal manipulation by defrauders as well as to the imperfect information of defrauders about the audit frequency the model is calibrated with data from a large european insurance company we show that it is possible to improve our results by separating different groups of insureds with different moral costs of fraud finally our results indicate how the deterrence effect of the audit scheme can be taken into account and how it affects the optimal auditing strategy

beyond the poverty agenda insights from the new politics of development in uganda summary the politics of development has shifted significantly in recent years with largely negative implications for the poverty agenda this is particularly apparent in countries like uganda where poverty reduction papers have been displaced by national development plans aimed at structural transformation driven by the discovery of oil the growing influence of rising powers vis a vis traditional donors and domestic political shifts although this heralds the possibility of deeper national ownership over development policy international financial institutions have adopted strategies to maintain their influence moreover uganda currently lacks the underlying political capacities and relationships required to roll out this ambitious new agenda

rural poverty dynamics in kenya structural declines and stochastic escapes we use panel survey data and household event histories to explore patterns of rural poverty dynamics in kenya over the period 2000 2009 we find substantial mobility across poverty categories using economic transition matrices drawing on asset based approaches we distinguish stochastic from structural poverty transitions few households successfully escaped poverty through asset accumulation up to 35 of the upwardly mobile while a large proportion of households up to 66 declining into poverty experienced structural transitions using household event histories we find significant differences across structural poverty transition classes in livelihood strategies household level shocks and other factors

is globalization detrimental to financial development further evidence from a very large emerging economy with significant orientation towards policies abstractthis study attempts to explore the relationship between globalization and financial development by endogenizing economic growth population density inflation and institutional quality for india during the period from 1971 2013 using the more conclusivecombined cointegration method the study provides evidence of cointegration among these variables the long run and short run estimates from the ardl model and causality tests respectively suggest that globalization in its all forms political social and economic and its overall measure as well as inflation are detrimental to financial development while economic growth and population density both promote financial development furthermore the results also point out that institutional quality is not conducive to financial development in india and there exists a feedback effect between financial development and inflation moreover financial development is influenced by economic growth institutional quality and population density

from institutions to financial development and growth what are the links this paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions financial development and economic growth from the large body of research on institutional development the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional arrangements in ameliorating worsening the information frictions and transaction costs that characterize the development of financial markets the paper then investigates the theoretical mechanisms by which these specific frictions affect economic growth and presents the stock of empirical evidence quantifying the impact of institutions on growth through financial development

arm s length relationships without moral hazard i show that cutting the flow of information between a principal and an agent can increase the power of the incentives of the agent to reveal private information jel d23 d82 d86 l20

property rights and finance which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment weak property rights or limited access to external finance from a survey of new firms in post communist countries we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits even when bank loans are available where property rights are relatively strong firms reinvest their profits where they are relatively weak entrepreneurs do not want to invest from retained earnings

markets for risk and openness to trade how are they related if protectionist trade policies aim to insure domestic industries against swings in world market prices the development of financial markets could lead to trade liberalization likewise trade lib

historical evidence on the finance trade growth nexus abstract we study linkages between financial development international trade and long run growth using data since 1880 for 17 now developed atlantic economies and a set of cross country and dynamic panel data models we find that finance and trade reinforce each other in data before 1930 but that these effects do not persist after the second world war financial development affects growth positively throughout the sample period while trade affects growth strongly and independently after 1945 we attribute the rising importance of trade to major post world war ii changes in tariffs and quantity restrictions associated with the gatt the establishment of the european common market and the gradual elimination of capital controls after 1973 the findings are robust to the use of deep fundamentals such as legal origin and indicators of the political environment as instruments for financial development and trade financial development however links more closely than trade to these fundamentals

financial structure in the age of globalization using a large panel data set covering 160 countries over the period 1990 to 2010 this article aims to address the question of how financial structure bank based versus market based system changes when economies are liberalized and opened to international capital markets specifically in this study globalization is characterized not only by trade and financial integration but also by other important aspects such as social globalization political globalization and cultural globalization the empirical results support the impacts of globalization on financial structure which are however diverse and strongly depend on the way to measure globalization and financial structure our finding also reveals a significant change in financial structure after the globalization process except the case of low income countries in which financial structure seems to be not correlated with either globalization process or other macroeconomic variables

commitment through renegotiation proof contracts with third parties the paper analyzes contracts as means of strategic commitment that is commitment against outside parties to the agreement it considers the example of an incumbent firm which enters a contractual relationship with its workers in order to deter entry it assumes away the possibility for the parties to precommit not to make pareto improving renegotiations of the agreement once entry has taken place under symmetric information the contract is thus found to be useless for entry deterrence if the incumbent firm or workers possess some private information excessive post entry production levels can however be sustained ex post since output reductions may not be incentive compatible while information asymmetries are usually welfare decreasing when the goal is optimal risk sharing they can thus be welfare improving for the contracting parties when commitment against outsiders is the goal of the contract the role of the renegotiation process as a constraint on sustainable agreements is stressed in the paper and the general relevance of strategic contractual commitment is discussed

financial development industrialization the role of institutions and government a comparative analysis between india and china this research is the first comparative attempt incorporating the role of economic demographic sectoral contribution government and trade in explaining financial development for india and china

escaping poverty and becoming poor who gains who loses and why abstract different households have followed very different economic trajectories this study of 35 north indian villages shows members of 11 1 of 6 376 households in these villages have overcome poverty in the last 25 years while members of another 7 9 have fallen into poverty households escape from poverty is assisted by one set of factors but an entirely different set of factors is associated with households decline two distinct sets of policies are required thus one set to promote escape from poverty and another set to arrest decline into poverty poverty has some distinctly local antecedents a methodology for tracking changes in poverty at the local level is developed that community groups and others can use to assess change and examine causes

strategic ignorance and the robustness of social preferences participants in dictator games frequently avoid learning whether their choice to maximize their own earnings will help or hurt the recipient and then choose selfishly exploiting the moral wiggle room provided by their ignorance however this is found in an environment in which the dictator must actively learn the true payoffs so inaction means ignorance does this effect persist when one must actively choose either to be ignorant or to be informed or when one must actively choose to remain ignorant in fact whereas 45 of dictators remain ignorant when one must click to become informed this drops to 25 when one must click in either case and to 3 when one must click to remain ignorant although the exploitation of moral wiggle room is not merely an artifact it is much like social behavior itself subject to environmental and psychological factors that may reinforce or undermine its impact data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2014 1989 this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

a new database on the structure and development of the financial sector this article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time the database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size activity and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets it improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions and constructing measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets this article introduces a new database the first to provide comprehensive measures of the development structure and performance of the financial sector this database is the first to define and construct indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial intermediaries such as insurance companies pension funds and non deposit money banks it is also the first to include indicators of the size of primary equity markets and primary and secondary bond markets in constructing the database authors carefully deflate measures and match stock and flow variables

basel iii and perceived resilience of banks in the brics economies abstractthis study investigates how the additional capital and liquidity requirements of basel iii would increase the resilience of banks in particular using panel data from 2007 to 2014 we examine the resilience of banks in the brics economies our results suggest that a 10 increase in capital adequacy ratio car tier 1 capital ratio tra and leverage ratio lev the resilience as measured by z score of banks increases by about 2 18 0 89 and 1 31 respectively similarly for a 100 increase in liquidity coverage ratio lcr the resilience of banks increases by 0 51 1 10 and 1 19 respectively in the models associated with car tra and lev hence our findings suggest that the car is robust to increase the resilience of banks our study also reveals that the lcr and lev are the most effective to increase the resilience of banks if implemented simultaneously we also find that the stage of economic development does not matter in formulating policies for the brics economies and finally

openness and the finance growth nexus abstract rajan and zingales 2003 hypothesize that openness trade and financial is a crucial determinant of financial development the main policy implication emerging from this hypothesis is that openness should be promoted as a means of facilitating economic growth through financial development while subsequent research confirms that openness affects financial development we study whether finance continues to be growth promoting as economies become increasingly open a key implicit assumption behind the policy recommendation using data from 78 economies for the period 1981 2006 we find that very high levels of financial openness generally erode the growth promoting role of financial development while high trade openness strengthens it these worldwide findings by and large hold for subsamples of sub saharan african latin american and oecd economies notable exceptions are the invariance of the finance growth fg nexus on trade openness in oecd economies and the positive effect of financial openness on the fg link in latin american economies

uncertainty capital flows and maturity mismatch abstract this paper explores a how the financial uncertainty generated by volatile international capital flows interacts with maturity mismatch on the balance sheets of nonfinancial firms to increase the volatility of output investment and total factor productivity tfp in emerging market economies i build a model of a small open economy in which financial frictions force firms to fund long term projects with short term debt in response to changes in the level of uncertainty regarding the availability of foreign borrowing firms adjust their long term investment contributing to the volatility of investment and output as well as generating endogenous fluctuations in aggregate productivity using data from a panel of major emerging markets i show that the volatility of portfolio debt flows negatively affects output by dampening investment while the volatility of equity flows which do not generate maturity mismatch has no effect consistent with the mechanism in the model the negative impact of capital flow volatility is larger at low levels of financial development and in industries with longer time to build lags my estimates imply that shocks to capital flow volatility account for one fifth of the excess output volatility of the emerging markets in my sample relative to a set of small open advanced economies

demographic transition in resource rich countries a blessing or a curse summary this study argues that resource wealth is a key factor for understanding income effects of demographic transition we develop a simple model highlighting how the income effect of increased labor supply may depend on resource rents and provide empirical evidence that support the theoretical predictions using panel data covering the period from 1982 to 2006 for more than 120 countries we find a negative interaction effect between resource wealth and demographic transition on national income moreover the negative interaction effect does not depend on institutional quality and is found also across different samples

credit and efficiency in centralized and decentralized economies we study a credit model where because of adverse selection unprofitable projects may nevertheless be financed indeed they may continue to be financed even when shown to be low quality if sunk costs have already been incurred we show that credit decentralization offers a way for creditors to commit not to refinance such projects thereby discouraging entrepreneurs from undertaking them initially thus decentralization provides financial discipline nevertheless we argue that it puts too high a premium on short term returns the model seems pertinent to two issues soft budget constraint problems in centralized economies and differences between anglo saxon and german japanese financing practices

dynamic incentives and responsibility accounting a comment abstract indjejikian and nanda j accounting and economics 27 1999 177 establish that lack of commitment results in an expected economic loss relative to a long term full commitment contract if there is inter period correlation of performance measures they attribute this loss to a ratchet effect we demonstrate the following first their proposed equilibrium is not sustained unless there is some form of limited commitment second these limited commitment assumptions need not induce a ratchet effect third the ratchet effect is neither necessary nor sufficient for an expected economic loss to occur the loss is due to the principal s inability to commit ex ante to the second period incentive rate

is financial inclusion good for bank stability international evidence abstract financial inclusion has become an important public policy priority following the recent global financial crisis yet we know very little of how it impacts soundness of the providers of financial services using an international sample of 2635 banks in 86 countries over the period 2004 12 we find that higher level of financial inclusion contributes to greater bank stability the positive association is particularly pronounced with those banks that have higher customer deposit funding share and lower marginal costs of providing banking services and also with those that operate in countries with stronger institutional quality the results are robust to instrumental variables analysis controlling for bank fixed effects alternative measures of financial inclusion among several other robustness tests our results highlight that the importance of ensuring inclusive financial system is not only a development goal but also an issue that should be prioritised by banks as such a policy drive is good for their stability

a contracting perspective on earnings quality abstract this paper analyzes the impact of signal to noise ratios and the autocorrelation of a performance measure on the principal s welfare in dynamic agencies with renegotiation we consider the impact of changes in the persistent transitory and reversible components of accounting earnings on its usefulness in valuation versus contracting increasing the persistent components and reducing the reversible components are generally desirable for valuation but not for contracting eliminating transitory components of earnings is generally desirable for valuation but not necessarily for contracting we discuss the contracting implications of differences in the autocorrelations of accounting earnings versus stock returns

oil curse and finance growth nexus in malaysia the role of investment abstract we empirically examine the existence of an oil curse in the finance growth nexus in malaysia we provide new insights into the oil curse phenomenon in malaysia that challenges the conventional argument that malaysia is a counter example of an oil curse country we do not find any significant evidence of direct effects of financial development on tfp however there are direct and positive effects on the level of investment due to financial development and oil dependence while we do not find statistical evidence of a direct negative impact of oil rent on economic growth our results reveal that the symptoms of an oil curse exist specifically we find that oil rent has a weak indirect impact on the finance growth nexus through the quantitative channel or investment quantity the policy implications of our findings are that the financial sector should be more involved in productive investment activities that can strengthen its role in economic growth and that policymakers should reduce dependence on oil and promote economic diversification

health insurance and other risk coping strategies in uganda the case of microcare insurance ltd summary to reduce the burden of health expenditures in developing countries health insurance schemes have become popular and now feature prominently in poverty reduction strategies there is however limited empirical evidence on the effect of such schemes on the livelihoods of clients especially regarding household strategies to finance medical expenditures this paper explores the relationship between health insurance and other risk coping strategies used to finance medical expenditures in uganda insurance is associated with a lower frequency of asset sales but not with lower incidences of borrowing the amount of money borrowed or generated through the sales of assets is lower for insured households

managerial legacies entrenchment and strategic inertia this paper argues that the legacy potential of a firm s strategy is an important deter minant of ceo compensation turnover and strategy change a legacy makes ceo replacement expensive because firm performance can only partially be attributed to a newly employed manager boards may therefore optimally allow an incumbent to be entrenched moreover when a firm changes strategy it is optimal to change the ceo because the incumbent has a vested interest in seeing the new strategy fail even though ceos have no specific skills in our model legacy issues can explain the empirical association between ceo and strategy change this paper proposes a model of ceo replacement and puts forward a novel determinant for turnover decisions the legacy potential of a firm s strategy we mean by this the extent to which a manager s decisions affect future firm cash flows potentially beyond the manager s own tenure the replacement of a ceo is arguably one of the most important decisions a firm takes yet the theoretical and empirical finance literature has relatively little to say about the firm and manager specific characteristics that lead to one manager being fired and replaced by another as brickley 2003 points out the only variable that predicts turnover empirically is poor firm performance but it has little pre dictive power theoretical papers on managerial turnover tend to reduce ceo successions to a sequence of static interactions see below for more details as such they do not distinguish between a ceo who is hired and can start a fresh project or one who is constrained in this choice because he inherits a prede cessor s long term strategy our paper focuses on this latter phenomenon and investigates turnover decisions when strategy choices have a legacy potential the fact that a dynamic link exists between a ceo and his predecessor is probably more recognized in the accounting literature than in finance pourciau both authors are from the toulouse school of economics and the institut d administration des

dynamic agency with renegotiation and managerial tenure this paper proves the renegotiation proofness principle for a dynamic len linear contracts exponential utility normal distributions model and examines the impact of repeated renegotiation on incentives and managerial tenure when performance information is serially correlated in addition to providing a general solution to a multiperiod agency problem with serially correlated performance measures this paper characterizes optimal managerial tenure turnover policies as a function of the time series properties of performance measures with negatively correlated performance measures the principal prefers longer managerial tenure and no turnover is optimal with positively correlated performance measures absent a switching cost turnover every period is optimal in the presence of a fixed switching cost interior optimal turnover policies exist if the performance measures are positively correlated switching costs are necessary but not sufficient for interior optimal tenure the optimal turnover policies present an alternative to theories of performance driven managerial turnover and are consistent with evidence that a majority of managerial turnovers are age related normal retirements

multiyear budgets and fiscal performance panel data evidence abstract in the last two decades more than 120 countries have adopted a multiyear budget process medium term framework or mtf that enables the central government to set multiyear fiscal targets this paper analyzes a newly collected dataset of worldwide mtf adoptions during 1990 2008 it exploits within country variation in adoption in a dynamic panel framework to estimate mtfs impacts on aggregate as well as sectoral measures of fiscal performance we find that on average multiyear budgeting improves budget balance by about 2 percentage points with more advanced mtf phases having a larger impact higher phase mtfs also reduce health spending volatility while only the top phase mtf has a measurable impact on health sector technical efficiency

disclosure policy and industry fluctuations this paper examines voluntary disclosures in a repeated oligopoly and their association with price setting behavior and industry profits along industrial fluctuations the analysis focuses on the collectively optimal equilibrium among oligopoly firms we show that in industries that are highly concentrated or feature low cost of capital nondisclosure is prevalent and results in stable product prices and high profit margins otherwise firms may selectively disclose to soften competition in the product market under partial disclosure firms withhold information during sharp industry expansions or declines consequently the disclosure policy dampens the dissemination of shocks to the industry this paper was accepted by mary barth accounting

the interest group theory of financial development evidence from regulation abstract we use a new dataset of de jure measures of trade capital account product market and domestic financial regulation for 91 countries from 1973 to 2005 to test rajan and zingales s 2003 interest group theory of financial development in line with the theory we find strong evidence that trade liberalization is a leading indicator of domestic financial liberalization this result is robust to the use of different data frequencies annual 5 year intervals estimation methods ols 2sls system gmm and a check for non linear effects however in contrast to the theory we do not find consistent evidence of an effect of capital account liberalization

why growth is not enough household poverty dynamics in northeast gujarat india despite high growth rates in gujarat exceeding 9 per cent per year over the decade of the 1990s poverty in 36 villages located in the northeastern part of this state has changed hardly at all in these villages 9 5 per cent of households escaped from poverty over the past 25 years but 6 3 per cent of households became poor at the same time escape and descent are not symmetric different reasons account for escaping poverty than those for declining into poverty growth alone is hardly sufficient to achieve poverty reduction on any significant scale public policies will be needed to address directly the separate causes for descent into poverty

accounting policies in agencies with moral hazard and renegotiation we emphasize the role of accounting policies and their audit in an earnings management setting we use a two period agency in which three frictions interact the agent privately observes action or effort supply and output and the initial contract is subject to renegotiation this creates a setting in which both players behavior is of concern and importantly information rationing is efficient moreover this information rationing is directly interpretable as being produced by an accounting policy whose application is ensured by an auditor

globalisation institutional reforms and financial development in east asian economies this study investigates the dynamic effects of globalisation on institutions and financial development in east asian economies using panel data tests our empirical results demonstrate that globalisation has a significant influence on institutional quality and that institutional reforms in turn facilitate and support financial development in particular the development of the banking sector in east asia globalisation is also found to have a favourable direct impact on stock market development without passing through an institutional quality channel

does international integration matter for financial development in africa this article analyses the links between international financial and trade integration and financial development in sub saharan african ssa countries it is based on a panel data set using methods that tackle slope heterogeneity cross sectional dependence and nonstationarity the results do not point to a general direct robust link between trade and financial integration and financial development in ssa once we control for other factors such as gdp per capita and inflation the findings may be due to a number of factors including distortions in domestic financial markets relatively weak institutions and or poor financial sector supervision we find some indication that financial integration is more important for financial development in countries with better institutional quality stronger scores in some measures of the quality of banking regulation and supervision are also linked to a positive association between integration and financial development in some of our results thus african policy maker

linkages between financial deepening trade openness and economic development causality evidence from sub saharan africa summary this contribution tests for causality between financial deepening trade openness and economic development for 16 sub saharan african countries the hsiao granger method is used to add to the existing empirical evidence only limited support is found for the popular hypothesis of finance led growth in general the evidence indicates that financial deepening and trade openness have swayed economic development rather marginally in particular the investigated countries have failed to benefit from financial deepening development strategies prioritizing financial or trade sector development hence cannot be supported

ten years of q squared implications for understanding and explaining poverty summary over the past decade there have been a number of initiatives to promote a more systematic integration of quantitative and qualitative or q squared approaches to poverty analysis in the global south and a large body of literature had emerged the objective of the article is to present a selective review of this empirical work with a view to demonstrate the value it has added for understanding and explaining poverty the evidence strongly suggests that q squared approaches have aided our understanding of the characteristics of the poor and the causes of poverty

can we trust shoestring evaluations many more impact evaluations could be done and at lower unit cost if evaluators could avoid the need for baseline data using objective socio economic surveys and rely instead on retrospective subjective questions on how outcomes have changed asked post intervention but would the results be reliable this paper tests a rapid appraisal shoestring method using subjective recall for welfare changes the recall data were collected at the end of a full scale evaluation of a large world bank supported poor area development program in china qualitative recalls on how living standards have changed are found to provide only weak and biased signals of the changes in consumption as measured from contemporaneous surveys importantly the shoestring method was unable to correct for the selective placement of the program favoring poor villages the results of this case study are not encouraging for future applications of the shoestring method although similar tests are needed in other settings

financing growth through foreign aid and private foreign loans nonlinearities and complementarities abstract are the growth consequences of foreign aid and foreign private loans different for the recipient nations in this study we analyze in a unified way how these two instruments affect economic growth of 131 developing nations over the period 1996 2010 we find that there are diminishing returns to foreign aid while there are increasing returns to foreign loans using these estimated non linearities we find a critical level of international financial transfer where the marginal effect of foreign aid is larger than that of loans if and only if the transfer loans or foreign aid is below this critical level in addition we analyze the interaction between these two types of transfers and find evidence of complementarity disaggregation of aid into grants and concessional loans suggests that it is in fact the former that exhibits concave relationship with growth

arm s length relationships we show that lowering the cost of acquisition of information that a principal obtains about the performance of an agent may make it more difficult for the principal to commit to threats hence it will weaken incentives and can therefore be counterproductive this phenomenon is explored in a framework where improving the quality of information makes a commitment not to renegotiate less credible applications to the theory of the firm are briefly explored

trade openness financial openness and financial development in china abstract this paper investigates the impact of trade and financial openness on financial development in china we use three sets of indicators of financial development to distinguish size efficiency and competition as aspects of financial development the empirical results using dynamic panel estimation techniques suggest that both trade and financial openness are statistically significant determinants of financial efficiency and competition but that openness has a negative impact on the size of financial development our results also suggest that the marginal effects of openness on financial efficiency and competition are positive for the most open provinces but negative for the least open regions while the marginal effects of openness on the size of financial development are generally negative for most provinces in the sample the results reflect a mismatch problem between the distribution in the types of trading companies and the distribution of financial resources and also indicate that local incumbents may be strong impediments to financial development in china

an analysis of the principal agent problem most analyses of the principal agent problem assume that the principal chooses an incentive scheme to maximize expected utility subject to the agent s utility being at a stationary point an important paper of mirrlees has shown that this approach is generally invalid we present an alternative procedure if the agent s preferences over income lotteries are independent of action we show that the optimal way of implementing an action by the agent can be found by solving a convex programming problem we use this to characterize the optimal incentive scheme and to analyze the determinants of the seriousness of an incentive problem

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

capital account liberalization financial depth and economic growth abstract we show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of open capital accounts on financial depth and economic growth in a cross section of countries over the periods 1986 1995 and 1976 1995 countries having open capital accounts had a significantly greater increase in financial depth and over the 20 year period greater economic growth these results however are largely driven by the developed countries included in the sample the observed failure of capital account liberalization to promote financial deepening among developing countries suggests potentially important policy implications concerning the desirability of opening up the capital account

financial development and financial openness nexus the precondition of banking competition abstractwe examine the dynamic relationship between financial development and financial openness using the pooled mean group estimator developed by pesaran et al 1999 our results show that financial openness has a positive effect on financial development in the long run but may have a negative effect in the short run using estimates of country specific short run coefficients we also find that the adverse short run effects of financial openness are associated with a lower degree of banking competition the system gmm estimator also supports these findings suggesting that the financial development and financial openness nexus is contingent on the degree of banking competition a key policy implication is that a higher degree of banking competition is a precondition for financial openness to promote financial development

financial development and openness evidence from panel data abstract this paper addresses the empirical question of whether trade and financial openness can help explain the recent pace in financial development as well as its variation across countries in recent years utilising annual data from developing and industrialised countries and dynamic panel estimation techniques we provide evidence which suggests that both types of openness are statistically significant determinants of banking sector development our findings reveal that the marginal effects of trade financial openness are negatively related to the degree of financial trade openness indicating that relatively closed economies stand to benefit most from opening up their trade and or capital accounts although these economies may be able to accomplish more by taking steps to open both their trade and capital accounts opening up one without the other could still generate gains in terms of banking sector development thus our findings provide only partial support to the well known rajan and zingales hypothesis which stipulates that both types of openness are necessary for financial development to take place