peer group formation in an adverse selection model this paper develops an adverse selection model where peer group systems are shown to trigger lower interest rates and remove credit rationing in the case where borrowers are uninformed about their potential partners and ex post state verification or auditing by banks is costly peer group formation reduces interest rates due to a collateral effect namely cross subsidisation amongst borrowers acts as collateral behind a loan by uncovering such a collateral effect this paper shows that peer group systems can be viewed as an effective risk pooling mechanism and thus enhance efficiency notjust in the full information set up a well known family of adverse selection models in the stiglitz and weiss 1981 tradition demonstrates that when banks are imperfectly informed about the riskiness of borrowers projects and therefore cannot discriminate against risky borrowers interest rates become inefficiently high and worthy borrowers are driven out of the credit market the extent of this problem is substantially magnified when borrowers do not have adequate collateral to secure a loan typically adverse selection combined with lack of collateral leads to prohibitively high interest rates poorly endowed individuals e g students immigrants the unemployed and a vast majority of poor individuals in developing countries often face such high rates and therefore cannot take advantage of profitable investment opportunities a peer group formation system represents a possible solution to the above problem under this system a bank lends to borrowers without collateral on condition that the borrowers organise themselves into groups and that participant borrowers within each group accept to take joint responsibility for a loan thus in addition to repaying their own share of the loan each group member must accept to repay the obligations of their defaulting peers otherwise the entire group is denied access to future refinancing systems of this kind have been very successful in practice they have generated lower interest rates for the rural poor in for example bangladesh the philippines bolivia and the state of arkansas in the united states moreover group lending has also been successfully implemented in large urban areas such in the cities of dhaka and chicago 1

the effectiveness of keynes tobin transaction taxes when heterogeneous agents can trade in different markets a behavioral finance approach abstract we develop a model in which boundedly rational agents apply technical and fundamental analysis to identify trading signals in two different speculative markets whether an agent trades and if so in which market with which strategy depends on profit considerations as it turns out an ongoing evolutionary competition between the trading strategies causes complex price dynamics which closely resembles the behavior of actual speculative prices moreover we find that if the agents have to pay a transaction tax in one market price variability decreases in this market but increases in the other market however the imposition of a uniform tax on all transactions stabilizes both markets our results suggest that if regulators of a market introduce a transaction tax other markets are likely to follow

competition and microfinance abstract competition between microfinance institutions mfis in developing countries has increased dramatically in the last decade we model the behavior of non profit lenders and show that their non standard client maximizing objectives cause them to cross subsidize within their pool of borrowers thus when competition eliminates rents on profitable borrowers it is likely to yield a new equilibrium in which poor borrowers are worse off as competition exacerbates asymmetric information problems over borrower indebtedness the most impatient borrowers begin to obtain multiple loans creating a negative externality that leads to less favorable equilibrium loan contracts for all borrowers

where is the plus in credit plus the case of chiapas mexico abstractit has become common to try and increase the effectiveness of microfinance programmes by adding supplementary services to the financial product however the added value accruing from this credit plus approach has been little analysed we hypothesise that the extent of added value from credit plus depends on the ability of the credit supplier to cultivate trust or social capital amongst clients applying difference in difference estimation we exploit a natural experiment of two credit plus programmes in mexico the findings suggest that credit plus is not universally effective but that it is at its most effective especially with low income groups where bonding within group social capital exists

the impact of microcredit programs on self employment profits do noncredit program aspects matter microcredit programs provide a two tiered approach to poverty alleviation credit for the purchase of capital inputs in order to promote self employment and noncredit services and incentives these noncredit aspects may be an important component of the success of microcredit programs however because they are costly to deliver and their contribution to the success of the programs is difficult to measure they may not be properly valued this paper uses primary data on household participants and nonparticipants in grameen bank and two similar microcredit programs to measure the total and noncredit effects of microcredit program participation on productivity the total effect is measured by estimating a profit equation and the noncredit effect by estimating the profit equation conditional on productive capital productive capital and program participation are treated as endogenous variables in the analysis i find large positive effects of participation and the noncredit aspects of participation on self em

microfinance literature a sustainability level perspective survey abstract since the early microcredit programs up to the present microfinance has grown exponentially as it has the academic interest on it as a research subject considering that this sector has impact in terms of sustainability any research in the field requires an analysis with wide criteria which should include the economic environmental social and governance dimensions eesg as well as their interrelationships the objectives of this survey are to investigate the contributions of microfinance sectoral scholarly research to sustainability through a systematic literature review using content analysis method contextualizing the scientific production and studying its terminology according to the eesg criteria and under global reporting initiative framework and finally to identify research gaps and to propose future research paths

the impact of group lending in northeast thailand abstract much of the literature on group lending focuses on its high repayment rates rather than its goal of promoting borrower welfare most studies that attempt to measure the impact of group lending neglect the issues of self selection and endogenous program placement thus leading to biased estimates of impact one reason for this neglect is the lack of data that would allow for identification of impact this paper surmounts these problems by using data from a quasi experiment conducted in northeast thailand in 1995 1996 program participants were identified in six control villages 1 year prior to receiving loans surveys were then conducted of these control members treatment members in eight older program villages and nonmembers in both types of village this survey design allows for straightforward estimation of impact the results indicate that program loans are having little impact although naive estimates of impact that fail to account for self selection and endogenous program placement significantly overestimate impact

microfinance and poverty evidence using panel data from bangladesh micro finance supports mainly informal activities that often have low market demand it may be thus hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of micro finance in an economy with low economic growth is modest or nonexistent the observed borrower level poverty impact is then a result of income redistribution or short run income generation the author addresses these questions using household level panel data from bangladesh the findings confirm that micro finance benefits the poorest and has sustained impact in reducing poverty among program participants it also has positive spillover impact reducing poverty at the village level but the effect is more pronounced in reducing extreme rather than moderate poverty

who benefits the interactional determinants of microfinance s varied effects abstractsince its emergence as a development tool scholars and practitioners have questioned microfinance s short and long term impacts but have had insufficient empirical evidence to assess them to address this gap this paper draws on mixed method research to assess the effects of microfinance loan and educational services over time it explores why even within the same microfinance institution mfi some borrowers benefit from microfinance services more than others in the short term and examines how this translates into long term impacts the article identifies understudied sources of intra group variation the diversity and choices of borrowers and mfi employees interacting with each other and their broader contexts

heterogeneous expectations boom bust housing cycles and supply conditions a nonlinear economic dynamics approach abstract we combine a standard stock flow housing market model incorporating explicit relationships between house prices the housing stock and the rent level with a parsimonious expectation formation scheme of housing market investors reflecting an evolving mix of extrapolative and regressive expectation rules the model results in a two dimensional discrete time nonlinear dynamical system based on realistic parameters the model is able to generate endogenous boom bust housing market dynamics with lasting periods of overvaluation and overbuilding we thus exploit our model to investigate how real forces in particular supply conditions interact with expectations driven housing market fluctuations

taming the bullwhip effect whilst watching customer service in a single supply chain echelon we study a generalised order up to policy that has highly desirable properties in terms of order and inventory variance and customer service levels it generates we quantify exactly the variance amplification in replenishment orders i e the bullwhip effect and the variance of inventory levels over time for i i d and the weakly stationary auto regressive ar moving average ma and auto regressive moving average arma demand processes we demonstrate that high customer service as measured by fill rate and smooth replenishments need not increase inventory cost substantially we observe that in some instances of the arma demand pattern this comes at the expense of a relatively small increase in safety stock whilst in other instances inventory levels can actually be reduced

assessing the impact of microcredit a zambian case study expectations are high but evidence of the impact of microcredit remains in short supply this article estimates the impact of an urban credit programme in zambia on business performance and on a range of indicators of wellbeing borrowers who obtained a second loan experienced significantly higher average growth in business profits and household income inflexible group enforcement of loan obligations resulted in some borrowers especially amongst those who had taken only one loan being made worse off our methodological investigations suggest that the supply of rigorous impact studies can be increased by basing them on data collection that serves a wider range of purposes including market research

low profile or entrepreneurial gender class and cultural adaptation in the global microfinance industry summary this study examines how discourses of entrepreneurial womanhood filtered through a chain of hierarchically positioned actors in global microfinance translate into interactions with borrowers drawing from ethnography interviews and document analysis on a set of entrepreneurial trainings delivered to nonentrepreneurial borrowers in urban india this study argues that parallel conflicting processes of cultural adaptation within the organization and tensions between various actors create an environment in which there is no incentive to cater to the interests of working class clients commercialized microfinance thus may not necessarily produce accountability to client interests

microfinance and poverty in bolivia both in its institutional range and in its penetration of financial markets the microfinance sector in bolivia rivals any in the world and has played a major part in extracting the macro economy from meltdown since the mid 1980s we seek specifically to assess its impact on poverty and do this through small sample surveys on four microfinance institutions two urban and two rural using a range of poverty concepts income generated both through the borrower s enterprise and through the labour market asset holdings and diversity and various measures of vulnerability all the institutions studied had on balance positive impacts on income and asset levels with income impacts correlating negatively with income on account of poor households choosing to invest in low risk low return assets microfinance may however augment vulnerability average debt service ratios of microfinance clients are disturbingly high and if the coping mechanisms used by borrowers fail borrowers may be forced out of the

microfinance and poverty a macro perspective we test the hypothesis that microfinance reduces poverty at the macro level using cross country and panel data which are constructed by the microfinance information exchange data on microfinance institutions mfis and the world bank data taking account of the endogeneity associated with mfis loans we show that a country with higher mfis gross loan portfolio per capita tends to have lower levels of poverty indices contrary to recent micro evidence our results suggest that microfinance significantly reduces poverty at macro level and thus reinforce the case for channeling funds from development finance institutions and governments of developing countries into mfis

impact of financial inclusion in low and middle income countries a systematic review of reviews financial inclusion programmes seek to increase access to financial services such as credit savings insurance and money transfers despite a wealth of systematic review evidence the impacts of financial inclusion are inconclusive hence the first systematic review of systematic reviews was undertaken to synthesize the impacts of financial inclusion interventions on economic social gender and behavioural outcomes thirty two systematic reviews were identified the headline finding is that impacts are more likely to be positive than negative but the effects vary and appear not to be transformative in scope or scale as they largely occur in the early stages of the causal chain the effects of financial services on core economic and social poverty indicators are small and inconsistent there is no evidence for meaningful behaviour change outcomes the effects on women s empowerment appear generally positive but they depend upon programme features that are often peripheral to the financial service and cultural and geographical context accessing savings opportunities has small but more consistently positive effects for poor people and bears fewer downside risks for clients than credit the inconsistent quality of the primary evidence base that formed the basis of their syntheses raises concerns about the reliability of the overall findings

the impact of short term credit on microenterprises evidence from the fincomun bimbo program in mexico abstract the lack of credit is often mentioned as one of the major constraints facing small businesses we use differences in the phasing in of a new lending program designed to serve clients of the largest snack food company in mexico to identify the impact of credit on outcomes of small retail enterprise in mexico city we find that the loans have positive impacts on the smallest firms but negative impacts on larger firms these results are consistent with hypotheses that smaller firms have higher returns to capital and face greater credit constraints given that the program involved loans given for 4 month terms we find surprisingly large effects on investment in fixed assets

microfinance its impact outreach and sustainability summary this symposium brings together recent empirical contributions with respect to a number of related and highly relevant issues on the economics of microfinance in particular the contributions provide answers to the following two main questions 1 does microfinance have an impact on the social and economic situation of the poor in developing nations and 2 are microfinance institutions sustainable in the long term and is there a trade off between sustainability and outreach

the stabilizing effect of inventory in supply chains this paper presents a hierarchical model framework for the analysis of the stabilizing effect of inventories in multiechelon manufacturing distribution supply chains this framework is used to compare the variance of demand to the variance of replenishment orders at different echelons of the system e g retailer wholesaler empirical data and experience with management games suggest that in most industries inventory management policies can have a destabilizing effect by increasing the volatility of demand as it passes up through the chain the bullwhip effect our model helps to explain these observations and indicates mechanisms that can promote stabilization the analysis results also define sufficient conditions for the existence of stabilization and relate these conditions to the optimality of myopic control policies

targeting the poor using community information abstract governments and aid agencies target transfers to the poor but audits to deter the rich are costly this paper analyzes how community information can improve targeting if each community is given a hard budget constraint then targeting costs can be substantially reduced by asking recipients to make reports about each other audits are threatened in the event of a disagreement but never carried out in equilibrium this scheme is immune to collusion

gender and microfinance performance why does the institutional context matter summary this paper investigates why and under which institutional circumstances female membership in microfinance institutions mfi improves mfi performance in terms of debt repayment specifically this paper theorizes that female membership in mfis improves the mfi s performance through enhanced debt repayment especially under adverse cognitive and regulatory institutional conditions we draw upon unique qualitative and quantitative data covering 26 microfinance projects in 22 african eastern european latin american and asian countries this study has implications for the microfinance literature in that it challenges the widely held assumption that female participation has a positive effect on mfi performance under all institutional circumstances

expanding credit access using randomized supply decisions to estimate the impacts expanding access to commercial credit is a key ingredient of financial development strategies there is less consensus on whether expanding access to consumer credit helps borrowers particularly when loans are extended at high interest rates popular skepticism about unproductive usurious lending is fueled by research highlighting behavioral biases that may induce overborrowing we estimate the impacts of expanding access to consumer credit at a 200 annual percentage rate apr using a field experiment and follow up data collection the randomly assigned marginal loans produced significant net benefits for borrowers across a wide range of outcomes there is also some evidence that the loans were profitable the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

competition between microfinance ngos evidence from kiva summary this paper investigates empirically the effect of competition between microfinance ngos seeking subsidized capital from individual social investors although ngo behavior in competitive environments is often subject to controversy there is little formal empirical evidence to illustrate theoretical findings and inform policy using data from kiva an online peer to peer p2p microfinance platform we find that competition has a sizable negative impact on projects funding speed and that the effect is stronger between close substitutes this is important because competition for subsidized capital implies organizational pressures similar to those faced when ngos compete for donations

borrowing money exchanging relationships making microfinance fit into local lives in kumaon india summary why don t microfinance clients use programs the way development planners and funders expect why do clients change how microfinance projects function in unanticipated ways previous scholarship on microfinance has overlooked the relevance of already existing borrowing practices and norms to how people engage with and use microfinance over 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the kumaon region of eastern uttarakhand state in northern india i found that kumaonis altered the microfinance program of a local ngo to make it fit with their already existing borrowing practices which were intimately tied to their livelihood strategies kumaoni livelihoods were based on exchange relationships with family friends and neighbors through which they could secure the means for physical and financial survival as well as social and emotional survival these relationships were governed by a moral economy that obligated exchange partners to properly assist one another and ensured balance between partners and across multiple social ties rather than abandoning their exchange relationships kumaonis and local fieldworkers who also relied on these ties altered microfinance so that it fit with this moral economy and became another node in the already existing networks of assistance if they had not been able to alter projects kumaonis would likely have stopped participating as other groups in similar circumstances around the globe have done although the microfinance program was a success in the eyes of beneficiaries senior staff members and donors remained unaware of why projects changed on the ground to ensure that development programs can be made relevant to people s lives and cultural values development practitioners must relinquish control over the minutiae of development and allow local level workers to negotiate the details of projects with participants

the use of village agents in rural credit delivery using a simple principal agent model this article examines the incentive problems that arise when a formal financial institution such as a rural bank utilises a member of the rural community to act as an agent in screening potential borrowers and collecting repayment optimal compensation schemes are derived for the agent and their implications are discussed in addition i show that the norms and rules that govern village life may aid the financial institution by helping to constrain possible strategic behaviour by the agent

the impact of pricing policy on sales variability in a supermarket retail context abstract the bullwhip effect is recognized to be a significant cost driver in supply chains one of the measures proposed frequently to counter bullwhip effect is price stability through everyday low pricing edlp however this study suggests that with an auto regressive ar1 demand process the use of constant instead of dynamic pricing may result in lower profitability and higher demand volatility an optimal price and stocking level policy is developed with normally distributed demand in this study and the model is tested using parameters from a supermarket scanner data set to determine the impact of two pricing policies the hypothesis that low prior period demand leads to discounted pricing is also tested and partially supported

high noon for microfinance impact evaluations re investigating the evidence from bangladesh recently microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified it such as pitt and khandker chemin applied propensity score matching to the pitt and khandker data finding different impacts but does not disaggregate by gender of borrower we first replicate chemin and extend his analysis in two ways we test the robustness of propensity score matching results to selection on unobservables using sensitivity analysis and we investigate propensity score matching estimates of impacts by gender of borrowers the mainly insignificant impacts of microfinance differ greatly by gender of borrower but are all vulnerable to selection on unobservables we are therefore not convinced that the relationships between microfinance and outcomes are causal with these data

a measure of bullwhip effect in supply chains with a mixed autoregressive moving average demand process abstract in this paper we quantify the impact of the bullwhip effect the phenomenon in which information on demand is distorted as moving up a supply chain for a simple two stage supply chain with one supplier and one retailer assuming that the retailer employs a base stock inventory policy and that the demand forecast is performed via a mixed autoregressive moving average model arma 1 1 we investigate the effects of the autoregressive coefficient the moving average parameter and the lead time on the bullwhip effect

when institutional change outruns the change agent the contested terrain of entrepreneurial microfinance for those in poverty we argue that institutional change moves through stages punctuated by recurring attempts to formally redefine the boundaries and logics of organizational fields that institutional entrepreneurs initially establish with a grounded theory model we demonstrate that institutional change in microfinance started with dominant development logic shifted to market logic and got stuck in a conflict over regulatory logic we show how the role of the entrepreneur can change markedly over time while the institutional change process continues unabated we present institutional entrepreneurship as an evolving phenomenon and suggest that the interplay between institutional entrepreneurs and established organizational fields is highly nuanced

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

measuring endogenous supply chain volatility beyond the bullwhip effect most recent research on supply chain volatility has focused on one particular dimension of that volatility namely the amplification of upstream order variability while not ignoring this aspect of supply chain volatility we focus on a different but equally critical aspect of volatility the cyclical oscillation of on hand and on order inventories about their target values we prove that such cyclicality does not require oscillatory or random retailer demand as a prerequisite the resulting volatility is therefore endogenous rather than simply an amplification of exogenous demand inputs we also measure the amount of amplification resulting from a step increase in demand the order amplification is the product of two factors each of which is clearly linked to either on hand or on order inventory our results attest that supply chain volatility can arise in the absence of exogenous oscillatory or random demand and suggest strategies for avoiding or minimizing such volatility

microfinance and household poverty reduction new evidence from india the objective of the present study is to examine whether household access to microfinance reduces poverty using national household data from india treatment effects model is employed to estimate the poverty reducing effects of micro finance institutions mfis loans for productive purposes such as investment in agriculture or non farm businesses on household poverty levels these models take into account the endogenous binary treatment effects and sample selection bias associated with access to mfis despite some limitations such as those arising from potential unobservable important determinants of access to mfis significant positive effect of mfi productive loans on multidimensional welfare indicator has been confirmed the significance of treatment effects coefficients has been verified by both tobit and propensity score matching psm models in addition we found that loans for productive purposes were more important for poverty reduction in rural than in urban areas however in urban areas simple access to mfis has larger average poverty reducing effects than the access to loans from mfis for productive purposes this leads to exploring service delivery opportunities that provide an additional avenue to monitor the usage of loans to enhance the outreach

reforms with a female face gender liberalization and economic policy in andhra pradesh india summary the state of andhra pradesh india provides a case study of a liberalization program with an emphasis on women s empowerment based on the state budget data and fieldwork data from two villages this paper investigates the content of this policy regime to argue that women s empowerment policies were ultimately constrained by the policy context of liberalization the state lowered shares of expenditure upon social reproduction and the substantive content of women s empowerment policy was reduced to a thrift and micro credit program fieldwork data indicate the latter lacks administrative support and relies upon the expenditure of time and resources by participants themselves re emphasizing class and caste inequalities among women and undermining the broader project of empowerment

the bullwhip effect in supply chain networks this paper analyzes the propagation and amplification of order fluctuations i e the bullwhip effect in supply chain networks operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies the supply chain network is allowed to include multiple customers e g markets any network structure with or without sharing information the paper characterizes the stream of orders placed by any supplier for any stationary customer demand processes and gives exact formulas for the variance of the orders placed and the amplification of order fluctuations the paper also derives robust analytical conditions based only on inventory management policies to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect for any network structure any inventory replenishment policies and arbitrary customer demand processes numerical examples show that the analytical results accurately quantify the bullwhip effect managerial insights are drawn from the analysis the methodology presented in this paper generalizes those in previous studies for serial supply chains

microfinance and child mortality microfinance institutions mfis offer targeted opportunities for the poor to generate additional income with a range of financial services including credit insurance savings accounts and money t

financial inclusion gender dimension and economic impact on poor households summary we examine the question in the context of gender dimension what is the evidence of the impact of the financial inclusion programs on poor households represented by women relative to that represented by men by constructing a good counterfactual and comparison group we employ the difference in difference estimator approach with panel least squares and generalized methods of moments using standard errors for a robust analysis we notice that income growth cagr net of inflation effect was 8 40 for women as against 3 97 for men indicating that the gender of participating poor undoubtedly affects the outcomes of these programs

conditions of reverse bullwhip effect in pricing under joint decision of replenishment and pricing abstract a reverse bullwhip effect in pricing rbp occurs when an amplification of price variability takes place moving from the upstream suppliers to the downstream customers in a supply chain in this study we investigate rbp conditions for supply chains where joint replenishment and pricing decisions are made commencing with a single stage supply chain in which a retailer faces a random and price sensitive demand we extend the results to a multi stage supply chain using a leader follower game theoretical framework we discuss rbp conditions for supply chains where newsvendor and continuous review inventory policies are employed and present numerical examples for commonly used demand functions

the impact of information enrichment on the bullwhip effect in supply chains a control engineering perspective this paper examines the beneficial impact of information sharing in multi echelon supply chains we compare a traditional supply chain in which only the first stage in the chain observes end consumer demand and upstream stages have to base their forecasts on incoming orders with an information enriched supply chain where customer demand data e g epos data is shared throughout the chain two types of replenishment rules are analysed order up to out policies and smoothing policies policies used to reduce or dampen variability in the demand for the class of out policies we will show that information sharing helps to reduce the bullwhipeffect variance amplification of ordering quantities in supply chains significantly especially at higher levels in the chain however the bullwhip problem is not completely eliminated and it still increases as one moves up the chain for the smoothing policies we show that information sharing is necessary to reduce order variance at higher levels of the chain the methodology is based on control systems engineering and allows us to gain valuable insights into the dynamic behaviour of supply chain replenishment rules we also introduce acontrolengineering based measure to quantify the variance amplification bullwhip or variance reduction

speculative behavior and the dynamics of interacting stock markets abstract we develop a simple agent based financial market model in which heterogeneous speculators apply technical and fundamental analysis to trade in two different stock markets speculators strategy market selections are repeated at each time step and depend on predisposition effects herding behavior and market circumstances simulations reveal that our model is able to explain a number of nontrivial statistical properties of and between international stock markets including bubbles and crashes fat tailed return distributions volatility clustering persistent trading volume coevolving stock prices and cross correlated volatilities against this background our model may be deemed to have been validated

heterogeneous expectations and speculative behavior in a dynamic multi asset framework abstract this paper develops a dynamic model of a financial market where heterogeneous agents invest among multiple risky assets and a risk free asset under a market maker scenario particular attention is paid to the case of two risky assets and two agent types fundamentalists and trend chasers whose beliefs on both first and second moments of the conditional distribution of returns are based on past observations conditions for the stability of the fundamental equilibrium are established and the effect of the correlation between the risky assets is examined it turns out that investors anticipated correlation and dynamic portfolio diversification do not always have a stabilizing role but rather may act as a source of complexity in the financial market

medium and long term participation in microcredit an evaluation using a new panel dataset from bangladesh the objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microcredit programs it utilises a new and large panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005 the data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers we employ different estimation strategies including triple difference and propensity score matching methods to control for selection bias the impact estimates indicate that the benefits from microcredit vary more than proportionately with the duration of participation in a program larger benefits are realized from longer term participation and that the benefits continue to accrue beyond departure from the program the findings indicate the need to observe longer periods of participation to provide a reliable basis for assessing the effectiveness of microcredit lending

reverse bullwhip effect in pricing price variability is one of the major causes of the bullwhip effect this paper analyzes the impact of procurement price variability in the upstream of a supply chain on the downstream retail prices procurement prices may fluctuate over time for example when the supply chain players deploy auction type procurement mechanisms or if the prices are dictated in market exchanges a game theory framework is used here to model a serial supply chain sequential price game scenarios are investigated to show that there is an increase in retail price variability and an amplified reverse bullwhip effect on prices rbp under certain demand conditions

fill rate in a periodic review order up to policy under auto correlated normally distributed possibly negative demand we investigate the inventory service metric known as the fill rate the proportion of demand that is immediately fulfilled from inventory the task of finding analytical solutions for general cases is complicated by a range of factors including correlation in demand double counting of backlogs and proper treatment of negative demand in the literature two approximate approaches are often proposed our contribution is to present a new fill rate measure for normally distributed auto correlated and possibly negative demand we treat negative demand as returns our approach also accounts for accumulated backlogs the problem reduces to identifying the minimum of correlated normally distributed bivariate random variables there exists an exact solution but it has no closed form however the solution is amenable to numerical techniques and we present a custom microsoft excel function for practical use numerical investigations reveal that the new fill rate is more robust than previous measures existing fill rate measures are likely to cause excessive inventory investment especially when fill rate targets are modest a strongly positive or negative autocorrelation in demand is present or negative demands exist our fill rate calculation ensures that the target fill rate is achieved without excessive inventory investments

the extension and exploitation of the inventory and order based production control system archetype from 1982 to 2015 in 1994 through classic control theory john naim and towill developed the automatic pipeline inventory and order based production control system apiobpcs which extended the original iobpcs archetype developed by towill in 1982 well recognised as a base framework for a production planning and control system due to the prevalence of the two original models in the last three decades in the academic and industrial communities this paper aims to systematically review how the iobpcs archetypes have been adopted exploited and adapted to study the dynamics of individual production planning and control systems and whole supply chains using various databases such as scopus web of science google scholar 111 papers we found that the iobpcs archetypes have been studied regarding the a modification of four inherent policies related to forecasting inventory lead time and pipeline to create a family of models b adoption of the iobpcs family to reduce supply chain dynamics and in particular bullwhip c extension of the iobpcs family to represent different supply chain scenarios such as order book based production control and closed loop processes simulation is the most popular method adopted by researchers and the number of works based on discrete time based methods is greater than those utilising continuous time approaches most studies are conceptual with limited practical applications described future research needs to focus on cost flexibility and sustainability in the context of supply chain dynamics and although there are a few existing studies more analytical approaches are required to gain robust insights into the influence of nonlinear elements on supply chain behaviour also empirical exploitation of the existing models is recommended

income and employment effects of micro credit programmes village level evidence from bangladesh micro credit programmes having made their mark in providing credit and other development services to the poor in a non traditional way are able to make significant changes in a rural economy this article attempts to quantify the village level impacts of the three most important micro credit programmes of bangladesh namely grameen bank bangladesh rural advancement committee brac and bangladesh rural development board s brdb rd 12 project descriptive and econometric analyses show that these programmes have positive impacts on income production and employment particularly in the rural non farm sector also growth in self employment has been achieved at the expense of wage employment which implies an increase in rural wages the article emphasises that an upward shift in the labour demand curve is required for both improved productivity and wage gains on a sustainable basis which can only be supported through a structural transformation of the rural economy

why micro credit may leave women worse off non cooperative bargaining and the marriage game in south asia abstract micro credit programmes targeting women continue to grow in south asia although research suggests that wives frequently hand over loans to their husbands women may also be unable to control the income generated by micro enterprises this article presents an intra household bargaining model explaining these findings and showing how credit may leave women worse off while benefiting men this game theoretic model also shows why a woman might rationally choose to give her loan to her husband even though she does not expect to benefit and knows he may not repay finally the article identifies the conditions necessary for micro credit to benefit women

coordinating lead times and safety stocks under autocorrelated demand we consider a supply chain in which orders and lead times are linked endogenously as opposed to assuming lead times are exogenous this assumption is relevant when a retailer s orders are produced by a supplier with finite capacity and replenished when the order is completed the retailer faces demands that are correlated over time either positively or negatively which may for example be induced by a pricing or promotion policy the auto correlation in demand affects the order stream placed by the retailer onto the supplier and this in turn influences the resulting lead times seen by the retailer since these lead times also determine the retailer s orders and its safety stocks which the retailer must set to cover lead time demand there is a mutual dependency between orders and lead times the inclusion of endogenous lead times and autocorrelated demand represents a better fit with real life situations however it poses some additional methodological issues compared to assuming exogenous lead times or stationary demand processes that are independent over time by means of a markov chain analysis and matrix analytic methods we develop a procedure to determine the distribution of lead times and inventories that takes into account the correlation between orders and lead times our analysis shows that negative autocorrelation in demand although more erratic improves both lead time and inventory performance relative to iid demand positive correlation makes matters worse than iid demand due to the endogeneity of lead times these effects are much more pronounced and substantial error may be incurred if this endogeneity is ignored

impact of market demand mis specification on a two level supply chain this paper investigates the impact of mis specifying the market demand process on a serially linked two level supply chain box jenkins models are used to represent both the true and a mis specified market demand processes it is shown that the impact of mis specification on cost is minor if the supply chain tries to minimise the market demand forecast errors furthermore our analysis suggests that mis specification does not always result in additional costs a managerial insight is revealed poor forecast accuracy is not always bad for the total supply chain costs in other words employing more accurate forecasting methods may actually result in higher total supply chain costs

interacting cobweb markets abstract we enrich the classical cobweb framework by allowing producers to enter different markets the market entry decision is repeated every period and depends on the markets historical profit differentials as a result the number of producers in a market and thus also a market s total supply vary over time analytical and numerical investigations of our four dimensional nonlinear model indicate that interacting cobweb markets may contribute to the strong cyclical price motion observed in many commodity markets we furthermore find that endogenous dynamics may either set in via a flip or a neimark sacker bifurcation interestingly the latter scenario is prevalent if producers are sufficiently risk averse

the impact of group based credit programs on poor households in bangladesh does the gender of participants matter this paper estimates the impact of participation by gender in the grameen bank and two other group based micro credit programs in bangladesh on labor supply schooling household expenditure and assets the empirical method uses a quasi experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village level heterogeneity we find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in bangladesh when women are the program participants for example annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs compared with 11 taka for men

the bullwhip effect in capacitated supply chains with consideration for product life cycle aspects abstract this paper presents an analysis of the bullwhip effect and net stock amplification in a three echelon supply chain considering step changes in the production rates during a product s life cycle demand the analysis is focused around highly complex and engineered products e g automobiles that have relatively long production life cycles and require significant capital investment in manufacturing using a simulation approach we analyze three stages of the product life cycle including low volumes during product introduction peak demand and eventual decline toward the end of the life cycle parts of the simulation model have been adopted by a major north american automotive oem as part of a scenario analysis tool for strategic supply network design and analysis the simulation results show that performance of a system as a whole deteriorates when there is a step change in the life cycle demand while restriction in production capacity does not significantly impact the bullwhip effect it increases the net stock amplification significantly for the supply chain setting under consideration furthermore a number of important managerial insights are presented based on sensitivity analysis of interaction effect of capacity constraints with other supply chain parameters

stopped myopic policies in some inventory models with generalized demand processes this paper considers single item inventory systems with immediate delivery and no economies of scale bounds are provided on the value loss relative to optimal cost for restricting attention to the class of inventory stocking policies that behave myopically up to a specified stopping time the stopping time may be random and may depend on demand histories as well as information exogenous to the firm the bounds are robust to the nature of the demand process faced after the stopping time so are applicable when the statistics of demand after the stopping time are unknown stopping times that are large with high probability imply that near term decisions are completely specified with high probability the general bounding results allow one to consider demand processes that may otherwise be analytically intractable it is shown that the class of demand models for which the assumption of additive i i d shocks is appropriate is the same class admitting effective myopic stocking policies the bounds also make rigorous the intuitive notion that myopic policies are least effective in systems with precipitous drops in demand coupled with an inability to recover cash invested in inventory the option of selling inventory at discount is a reality in many real systems and enhances the attractiveness of the myopic stocking policy in numerical examples the myopic policy is shown to be an effective competitor in a range of systems for which optimal policies are not known the results suggest that for systems with immediate delivery no economies of scale and no currently known optimal policy the myopic stocking rule is a reasonable default policy to adopt

fundamentals or trends a long term perspective on house prices using a long term time series covering 350 years of house prices along the herengracht in amsterdam we examine whether a fundamental factor or a trend explains house prices and whether their explanatory power is time varying we find that agents in the housing market switch in their formation of expectations about future changes in house prices between fundamental and momentum strategies specifically we show that agents base their expectations more on fundamentals during economic slowdowns and more on recent trends or momentum during economic booms

adding value to randomization with qualitative analysis the case of microcredit in rural morocco this paper analyzes microcredit demand and use to draw lessons on how households appropriate microcredit services it introduces qualitative analysis to a randomized study findings suggest that microcredit demand and use is shaped not only by agro ecological conditions but by two major partially interrelated factors debt related norms articulated with the perception of the sanction in case of repayment default and the social life of microcredit namely how social actors credit officers and local leaders engage with microcredit on a conceptual perspective we argue that microcredit markets do not result from supply confronting demand but instead are historical political and social constructs

do microfinance institutions benefit from integrating financial and nonfinancial services this article examines the impact of microfinance plus i e coordinated combination of financial and nonfinancial services on the performance of microfinance institutions mfis using a global data set of mfis in 77 countries we find that the provision of nonfinancial services does not harm nor improve mfis financial sustainability and efficiency the results however suggest that the provision of social services is associated with improved loan quality and greater depth of outreach

microfinance with chinese characteristics abstract analyzing household survey data from three microfinance program sites we provide an early systematic assessment of chinese microfinance programs which have grown rapidly since 1994 are based on the grameen model and include an unprecedented large scale government initiative we examine the empirical propositions that underpin successful microfinance programs reaching the poor targeting financial and operational performance sustainability and program benefits impact we find that nongovernmental programs perform well in all three areas but that governmental programs perform poorly given the remote location and focus on agricultural projects in china s poor areas we advocate greater flexibility in loan contract terms especially repayment schedules

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

measuring microfinance assessing the conflict between practitioners and researchers with evidence from nepal summary what accounts for the discrepancy between microfinance impact claims of development practitioners and the far smaller impacts found in experimental studies we demonstrate in a simple theoretical framework why before and after observations of practitioners overstate microfinance impacts and why estimations in some recent randomized trials understate the average treatment effect on the treated att our empirical study uses a unique data set from eastern nepal to study the impact of microfinance in villages where microfinance did not previously exist we find that approximately three fourths of the apparent impact of microfinance observed by practitioners is an illusion driven by correlated unobservable factors

microenterprise lending to female entrepreneurs sacrificing economic growth for poverty alleviation abstract this research compares the performance of female and male entrepreneurs in a microenterprise credit program in guatemala previous research and field practice has suggested that targeting credit at female borrowers allows for greater increases in household welfare but that male entrepreneurs may more aggressively expand enterprises when given access to credit in this paper we develop a model that shows that increases in value of home time during childbearing years for women may substantially account for gender differences in responses to credit access empirical results from guatemalan survey data yield estimations consistent with the predictions from our model

designing credit agent incentives to prevent mission drift in pro poor microfinance institutions abstract credit agents in microfinance institutions mfis must be given incentives to acquire information on potential borrowers and select them in accordance with the mfi s objectives we show that while giving incentives has no cost in for profit mfis it is costly in pro poor mfis when repayment and wealth are positively correlated a pro poor mfi cannot obtain the selection of poor clients in the proportion it wishes with incentives based solely on repayment it then becomes necessary to audit the share of very poor borrowers selected by an agent in order to provide the latter with adequate incentives when audit costs are large pro poor mfis may have to forego selection on wealth and use other targeting devices such as working in impoverished geographical locations driven by donor concerns with mission drift away from the poor audits on the wealth status of clients have been introduced at the level of mfis we show that introducing pro poor incentives requires extending such audits to the level of credit agents

contagion between asset markets a two market heterogeneous agents model with destabilising spillover effects abstract this paper investigates a two market heterogeneous agents model with biased trend followers and fundamentalists the two separate and identically modelled markets are mutually dependent only through the introduced bias of the chartists belief and co evolve over time the bias term depends on the state of the other market agents update their prediction rules for tomorrow s price according to their relative past performance as in brock and hommes 1997 1998 using both analytical and numerical methods we find that the bias may have destabilising spillover effects between two otherwise stable markets leading to irregular and unpredictable price dynamics with bubbles and crashes as the the intensity of choice to switch prediction rules becomes high our behavioural model provides a simple and intuitive explanation of co movements in asset markets

managing the order pipeline to reduce supply chain volatility the bullwhip effect in particular and supply chain volatility in general has been the subject of much analytical and empirical investigation by researchers one goal of this work has been to determine supply chain designs and policies that minimize volatility using a system dynamics approach we use three distinct supply chain volatility metrics to compare the ability of two alternative pipeline inventory management policies to respond to a demand shock the results indicate that no one policy dominates on all three metrics of supply chain volatility a simplistic static pipeline policy minimizes the bullwhip effect and lessens the likelihood of on hand inventory oscillations while a more sophisticated dynamic pipeline policy may converge more rapidly to the new equilibrium in addition simulation results suggest that the dynamic policy provides better customer service through fewer stockouts and backorders

adaptive inventory control for nonstationary demand and partial information this paper examines several different policies for an inventory control problem in which the demand process is nonstationary and partially observed the probability distribution for the demand in each period is determined by the state of a markov chain the core process however the state of this core process is not directly observed only the actual demand is observed by the decision maker given this demand process the inventory control problem is a composite state partially observed markov decision process pomdp which is an appropriate model for a number of dynamic demand problems in practice managers often use certainty equivalent control cec policies to solve such a problem however this paper presents results that demonstrate that there are other practical control policies that almost always provide much better solutions for this problem than the cec policies commonly used in practice the computational results also indicate how specific problem characteristics influence the performance of each of the alternative policies

measuring and avoiding the bullwhip effect a control theoretic approach an important contributory factor to the bullwhip effect i e the variance amplification of order quantities observed in supply chains is the replenishment rule used by supply chain members first the bullwhip effect induced by the use of different forecasting methods in order up to replenishment policies is analysed variance amplification is quantified and we prove that the bullwhip effect is guaranteed in the order up to model irrespective of the forecasting method used thus when production is inflexible and significant costs are incurred by frequently switching production quantities up and down order up to policies may no longer be desirable or even achievable in the second part of the paper a general decision rule is introduced that avoids variance amplification and succeeds in generating smooth ordering patterns even when demand has to be forecasted the methodology is based on control systems engineering and allows important insights to be gained about the dynamic behaviour of replenishment rules