access to markets and rural poverty evidence from household consumption in china abstract this paper presents evidence on the effects of access to domestic and international markets on per capita consumption of households using data from rural china the econometric analysis uses alternative identification schemes to address the potential endogeneity of access to markets we use straight line distances to coastline and navigable river along with the topography of the intervening counties as sources of exogeneous variations we also use identification through heteroskedasticity which does not rely on standard exclusion restrictions the results from alternative identification schemes show that better access to both domestic and international markets has positive effects on per capita consumption the domestic market effect is significantly larger in magnitude and there is complementarity between the access to domestic and international markets

a simple estimator for simultaneous models with censored endogenous reggressors this paper presents a simple two step estimator for models with censored endogenous regressors and sample selection bias the approach unifies the literature on censored endogenous regressors and sample selection bias and provides extensions the procedure employs generalized residuals to adjust for the inconsistency caused by the endogeneity of the censored regressors the paper also provides two new tests of weak exogeneity an empirical example examining the trade off between fringe benefits and wages indicates that the estimation procedure works well a monte carlo experiment suggests that the proposed tests have good power properties copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the microfinance promise in the past decade microfinance programs have demonstrated that it is possible to lend to low income households while maintaining high repayment rates even without requiring collateral the programs promise a revolution in approaches to alleviating poverty and spreading financial services and millions of poor households are served globally a growing body of economic theory demonstrates how new contractual forms offer a key to microfinance success particularly the use of group lending contracts with joint liability for the most part however high repayment rates have not translated into profits and studies of impacts on poverty yield a mixed picture in describing emerging tensions the paper highlights the diversity of innovative mechanisms beyond group lending contracts the measurement of financial sustainability the estimation of economic and social impacts the costs and benefits of subsidization and the potential to reduce poverty through savings programs rather than just credit the promise of microfinance has pushed far ahead of the evidence and an agenda is put forward for addressing critical empirical gaps and sharpening the terms of policy discussion

the part time premium enigma an assessment of the chilean case proquest denotes formulae omitted working part time has been seen by some researchers public policy advisers and politicians as a way for women to find a balance between home and paid work gregory and connolly 2008 bardasi and gornick 2008 however there is no agreement on the optimal balance indeed there are contrasting views on the subject those in favor suggest that in the absence of part time jobs female labor force participation would be substantially lower sundstrom 1991 dekker 2008 according to this belief women confronted with the choice between working full time and not working at all would opt for the latter on the other hand detractors in european countries assert that part time jobs imply a waste of resources and of investments in human capital since the many part time working women who are highly educated generally make a downward occupational move when they switch from full time to part time work gregory and connolly 2008 manning and petrongolo 2008 furthermore part time jobs have adverse repercussions for the economic well being of part time working women given that public social welfare benefits wage increases and professional development might be scarce for these women leiva 2000 warren 2008 fernandez kranz and others 2011 fernandez kranz and rodriguez planas 2011 in addition in mem ber countries of the organization for economic cooperation and develop ment oecd hourly earnings are lower manning and petrongolo 2008 and employer provided training less common gregory and connolly 2008 connolly and gregory 2009 in part time jobs than in full time jobs further more in those countries though the hourly earnings gap between women and men in full time work has been narrowing the same is not the case for female part time workers and males in full time jobs manning and petrongolo 2008 part time work among women after the birth of their first child is currently responsible for some of the pay gap between men and women kanji 2011 chile s rate of female labor force participation is one of the lowest in latin american countries cepal un eclac 2011 despite female educational attainment that is similar to or higher than that of other latin american countries carrillo gandelman and robano 2013 to increase female labor force partici pation the chilean government is promoting part time and home based work for women although part time work is not as extensive as in other countries the proportion of chilean women working part time has tripled in the past ten years and part time workers now represent more than 20 percent of the female work force national socio economic characterization survey casen 2009 contreras puentes and bravo 2005 show that in chile the female labor force participation rate is positively correlated with education it is not appar ent why female labor force participation is so low discrimination in the labor market or more generally the existent gender wage gap favorable to males nopo 2012 carrillo gandelman and robano 2013 might partially explain the low female participation rate as might cultural factors contreras and plaza 2010 find that women who have internalized machista values are less likely to participate in the labor market despite concerns of endogeneity owing to data limitations contreras and plaza 2010 find a negative rela tionship between female labor force participation and conservative values puentes and ruiz tagle 2011 using the voz de mujer survey analyze the same phenomenon while controlling for possible endogenous relationships 1 they find that cultural factors are not endogenously determined by a woman s labor participation decision on the contrary it seems that whether women work has little effect on cultural factors in the short term according to their study values develop in early childhood rather than during a woman s work ing life interestingly the same 2002 survey that contreras and plaza 2010 used was reapplied by the centro de estudios publicos and released in april 2012

nonparametric estimation of sample selection models sample selection models provide an important way of accounting for economic decisions that combine discrete and continuous choices and of correcting for nonrandom sampling nonparametric estimators for these models are developed in this paper these can be used for estimating shapes and important economic quantities as in standard nonparametnc regression endogeneity of regressors of interest is allowed for series estimators for these models are developed which are useful for imposing additivity restnctions that arise from selection corrections convergence rates and asymptotic normality results are derived an application to returns to schooling among australian young females is given

the impact of the federal reserve s large scale asset purchase programs on corporate credit risk estimating the effect of federal reserve s announcements of large scale asset purchase lsap programs on corporate credit risk is complicated by the simultaneity of policy decisions and movements in prices of risky financial assets as well as by the fact that both interest rates of assets targeted by the programs and indicators of credit risk reacted to other common shocks during the recent financial crisis this paper employs a heteroskedasticity based approach to estimate the structural coefficient measuring the sensitivity of market based indicators of corporate credit risk to declines in the benchmark market interest rates prompted by the lsap announcements the results indicate that the lsap announcements led to a significant reduction in the cost of insuring against default risk as measured by the cdx indexes for both investment and speculative grade corporate credits while the unconventional policy measures employed by the federal reserve to stimulate the economy have substantially lowered the overall level of credit risk in the economy the lsap announcements appear to have had no measurable effect on credit risk in the financial intermediary sector

deviations from purchasing power parity in the long run this paper demonstrates that deviations from purchasing power parity reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data since this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper proposes an alternative explanation which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism this paper will demonstrate that deviations from purchasing power parity ppp reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible exchange rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper therefore proposes an alternative explanation which does not presuppose free trade in goods but which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism the major implication of the theory and the results is that ppp is as likely to be violated in the long as in the short run as an empirical matter deviations from ppp can be observed for most currencies at any instant see kravis et al 21 stockman 37 and genberg 15 among others these deviations are typically both cumulative and persistent the real exchange rate can remain on either side of parity for lengthy but variable time intervals of a year or more as a consequence the current consensus shared

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

measuring market integration foreign exchange arbitrage and the gold standard 1879 1913 a major question in the literature on the classical gold standard concerns the efficiency of international arbitrage authors have examined efficiency by looking at the spread of the gold points gold point violations or the flow of gold or by tests of various asset market criteria including speculative efficiency and interest arbitrage these studies have suffered from many limitations both methodological and empirical we offer a new methodology for measuring market integration based on nonlinear theoretical models and threshold autoregressions we also compile a new high frequency series of continuous daily data from 1879 to 1913 we can derive reasonable econometric estimates of the implied gold points and price dynamics the changes in these measures over time provide an insight into the evolution of market integration

potential pitfalls for the purchasing power parity puzzle sampling and specification biases in mean reversion tests of the law of one price the ppp puzzle is based on empirical evidence that international price differences for individual goods loop or baskets of goods ppp appear highly persistent or even nonstationary the present consensus is these price differences have a half life that is of the order of five years at best and infinity at worst this seems unreasonable in a world where transportation and transaction costs appear so low as to encourage arbitrage and the convergence of price gaps over much shorter horizons typically days or weeks however current empirics rely on a particular choice of methodology involving i relatively low frequency monthly quarterly or annual data and ii a linear model specification in fact these methodological choices are not innocent and they can be shown to bias analysis towards findings of slow convergence and a random walk intuitively if we suspect that the actual adjustment horizon is of the order of days then monthly and annual data cannot be expected to reveal it if we suspect arbitrage costs are high enough to produce a substantial band of inaction then a linear model will fail to support convergence if the process spends considerable time random walking in that band thus when testing for ppp or loop model specification and data sampling should not proceed without consideration of the actual institutional context and logistical framework of markets

a new analysis of the determinants of the real dollar sterling exchange rate 1871 1994 the high persistence of both ppp deviations and the proxy variables for the equilibrium real rate might create a problem of spurious coefficient significance within recently applied nonlinear models to illustrate we consider the real dollar sterling exchange rate over the period 1871 1994 a nonlinear estar process with a time varying equilibrium seems to parsimoniously fit the data appropriate significance levels are obtained using the wild bootstrap method to adequately capture the conditional heteroskedasticity in the data our results provide further evidence for the nonlinear model and the implied speed of adjustment is found to be substantially faster than previously reported in the literature

confidence intervals for half life deviations from purchasing power parity existing point estimates of half life deviations from purchasing power parity ppp around 3 5 years suggest that the speed of convergence is extremely slow this article assesses the degree of uncertainty around these point estimates by using local to unity asymptotic theory to construct confidence intervals that are robust to high persistence in small samples the empirical evidence suggests that the lower bound of the confidence interval is between four and eight quarters for most currencies which is not inconsistent with traditional price stickiness explanations however the upper bounds are infinity for all currencies so we cannot provide conclusive evidence in favor of ppp either

real exchange rates in the short medium and long run abstract this paper uses long horizon autocorrelations and variance ratio statistics to test for long term mean reversion in real exchange rates unlike most previous tests of this hypothesis the tests do reject a random walk for monthly data in the post bretton woods era however the statistics indicate that positively correlated innovations rather than mean reversion are the source of the rejection tests using annual data for the twentieth century also reject the random walk in this case however the rejection can be attributed to mean reversion and confirms that ppp is a long term phenomenon

real exchange rate behavior abstract using random simulations with artificial data with identical sample characteristics to the long sample exchange rate data employed by lothian and taylor lothian j r and taylor m p 1996 the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries journal of political economy 104 488 509 we show that standard unit root tests have extremely low power over sample sizes corresponding to the recent float the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false is extremely low with 20 years or even 50 years of data and only reaches an acceptable level over much longer spans

the impact of microcredit borrowing on household consumption in bangladesh the rapid expansion of microcredit in recent years renders knowledge of its impact on poverty critical unfortunately empirical investigations have been limited by endogeneity issues and randomiz

the purchasing power parity persistence paradigm abstract rogoff journal of economic literature 1996 34 647 668 describes the remarkable consensus of 3 5 year half lives of purchasing power parity deviations among studies using long horizon data these studies however focus on rejections of unit roots in real exchange rates and do not use appropriate techniques to measure persistence our half life estimates explicitly account for serial correlation sampling uncertainty and most importantly small sample bias calculating confidence intervals as well as point estimates for long horizon and post 1973 data we find that even though most of the point estimates lie within the 3 5 year range univariate methods provide virtually no information regarding the size of the half lives

ppp strikes back aggregation and the real exchange rate we show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the ppp puzzle we prove that the aggregate real exchange rate is persistent because its components have heterogeneous dynamics established time series and panel methods fail to control for this using eurostat data we find that when heterogeneity is taken into account the estimated persistence of real exchange rates falls dramatically its half life for instance may fall to as low as eleven months significantly below the consensus view of three to five years

across time and regimes 212 years of the us uk real exchange rate i introduction this paper examines the behavior of the real exchange rate under different nominal exchange rate regimes using monthly data on the us uk exchange rate over the period 1794 2005 the 212 yr series encompasses five floating and four fixed exchange rate periods and includes a new monthly exchange rate series for the periods that precede the classical gold standard figures 1 and 2 show the behavior of the real and nominal exchange over the entire sample three key stylized facts emerge from the analysis a real exchange rate volatility is higher when the nominal exchange rate is floating b the contribution of price level changes to real exchange rate movements has decreased over time and c the persistence of real exchange rate has been considerably higher in the postwar period the real exchange rate is the price of output in one country relative to another that is the real exchange rate is given by q e p sup p where p and p sup are home and foreign price indexes and e is the nominal exchange rate that is the home price of foreign currency a key question that can be examined with a series that includes multiple regimes is whether real exchange rate behavior is invariant to the nominal exchange rate regime that is whether the properties of q depend on whether e is fixed or floating mussa 1986 demonstrates that short term volatility of the real exchange rate is lower when the nominal exchange rate is fixed mussa s study relies on postwar data from oecd countries most of which had fixed exchange rates until bretton woods collapsed in the early 1970s and floated thereafter as grilli and kaminsky 1991 hereafter gk note relying on such limited evidence is not sufficient to establish general validity of the proposition that real exchange rate volatility is higher under floating regimes to remedy this gk examined the us uk real exchange rate using monthly data beginning in 1885 their study encompassed three fixed rate periods the classical gold standard the interwar gold exchange standard and bretton woods and three floating periods two interwar intervals and the post bretton woods float they conclude that the nominal exchange rate regime is not as crucial to the behavior of the real exchange rate as previous analyses have suggested the behavior of the real exchange rate varies substantially across historical periods but not nominal exchange rate arrangements 192 in their analysis the bretton woods period was characterized by a unique degree of stability they argue that the commonly held belief that floating exchange rates lead to higher real exchange rate volatility is an artifact of the unusual stability of the 1950s and 1960s figure 1 omitted figure 2 omitted the additional data used in this study encompass two additional floating rate periods and one additional fixed rate period gk are surely correct that real exchange rate behavior varies across different time periods due to the evolution of institutions for example decreasing transaction costs development of the financial system and increasing nominal rigidity comparing historically adjacent fixed and floating regimes provides a rough way to control for long run historical changes in order to see whether the nominal regime matters for the real exchange rate of all the periods examined bretton woods clearly has the lowest real exchange rate volatility however mussa s conclusion that real exchange rate volatility is higher in floating periods does not appear to be an artifact of this stability examining the entire 212 yr period a consistent pattern emerges every nominal regime switch from fixed to floating is associated with an increase in real exchange rate volatility and every switch from floating to fixed is associated with a decrease although there is a consistent relationship between the real exchange rate volatility and the nominal exchange rate regime the source and persistence of real exchange rate movements have evolved considerably over time

real exchange rate behavior the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries using annual data spanning two centuries for dollar sterling and franc sterling real exchange rates we find strong evidence of mean reverting real exchange rate behavior using simple stationary autoregressive models estimated on prefloat data we easily outperform nonstationary real exchange rate models in dynamic forecasting exercises over the recent float such stationary univariate equations explain 60 80 percent of the in sample variation in real exchange rates although the degree of short run persistence may be high the econometric estimates imply a half life of shocks to the real exchange rate of about 6 years for dollar sterling and a little under 3 years for franc sterling

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

temporal aggregation and purchasing power parity persistence this paper uses a unique new monthly us uk real exchange rate series for the january 1794 december 2009 period to reexamine the academic debate over purchasing power parity ppp the consensus view described by rogoff 1996 is that ppp holds in the long run but short run deviations are very persistent with half lives ranging from 3 to 5 years most of the literature using long time series relies on the annual data developed by lee 1976 and lothian and taylor 1996 which were both constructed from underlying higher frequency data sources estimates of purchasing power parity persistence using these series may therefore be subject to temporal aggregation bias we find evidence of aggregation bias which indicates the half life of ppp deviations has been overestimated in much of the previous literature we also find that estimates of the half lives are further reduced once we account for the harrod 1933 balassa 1964 samuelson 1964 effect the result of aggregation bias appears to be robust even when considering the case that real exchange rates exhibit nonlinear dynamics

the extent of the market and stages of agricultural specialization this paper provides empirical evidence of nonlinearity in the relationship between crop specialization in a village economy and the extent of the market size of the urban market relevant for the village the results suggest that the portfolio of crops in a village economy becomes more diversified initially as the extent of the market increases however after the market size reaches a threshold the production structure becomes specialized again this evidence on the stages of agricultural diversification is consistent with the stages of diversification identified in the recent literature for the economy as a whole and also for the manufacturing sector the evidence highlights the importance of improving farmers access to markets through investment in transport infrastructure and removal of barriers to trading

causes of nonlinearities in low order models of the real exchange rate abstract this paper investigates the extent to which modern dsge models which feature local currency pricing home bias nontraded goods and incomplete markets can generate nonlinear real exchange rate dynamics that are consistent with those found in the time series literature using data from the current floating period our key findings are as follows first if the true model can be appropriately characterized as a set of linear equations then linearity tests that utilize univariate autoregressions of the real exchange rate suffer from an omitted variables problem which leads them to overestimate the true incidence of nonlinearity consequently studies that fail to control for this problem may spuriously find evidence of nonlinearities in the data despite the fact that the data generating process may be linear second we propose a strategy that can largely eliminate this distortion finally we find that dsge models solved using higher order approximations are capable of generating true structural nonlinearities in real exchange rates both asymptotically and in short samples

estimating incentive and welfare effects of nonstationary unemployment benefits the distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell dependent unemployment benefits displays time varying exit rates building on semi markov processes we translate these rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate structural estimation using german microdata allows us to discuss the effects of an unemployment benefit reform hartz iv the reform reduced unemployment by less than 0 1 percentage points contrary to general beliefs the net wage for most skill and regional groups increased taking the insurance effect of unemployment benefits into account however the reform is welfare reducing for 76 of workers

nominal exchange rate regimes and the real exchange rate abstract two assumptions about the real exchange rate are common in the literature on international finance 1 the real exchange rate is a random walk 2 the time series properties of the real exchange rate depend on the nominal exchange rate regime this paper presents evidence that indicates that the random walk behavior of the real exchange rate is only a characteristic of the post world war ii period moreover our findings also suggest that what is crucial to the real exchange rate behavior is the particular historical period rather than the nominal exchange rate arrangement

searching for nonlinearities in real exchange rates a recent innovation in modeling exchange rates has been the use of nonlinear techniques such as threshold autoregressive models and its smooth transition variants this paper investigates the smooth transition autoregressive star modeling strategy in an application to real exchange rates the key findings are as follows first using the methodology advocated by terasvirta 1994 we find evidence of nonlinear dynamics for several of the spot dollar real exchange rates using monthly data on five of the g7 countries however once estimated we find that the star specification is appropriate for only one of the three exchange rate series indicated to be an estar process moreover using simulations we show that the underlying methodology used to detect nonlinearities in the data exhibit substantial size biases which we attribute to influential observations we also investigate an alternative nonlinear specification and find that we can model the dollar sterling and the dollar lira real exchange rates better as an open loop tar process instead of a setar process

mean reversion in real exchange rates a modified dickey fuller test which is approximately uniformly most power invariant is employed to examine mean reversion in real exchange rates results from this test provide a wider and more significant support for mean reversion than the standard dickey fuller test

transactions costs and nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates an empirical investigation eolquilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity ppp conventional cointegration tests which ignore the effect of transactions costs may be biased against the long run ppp hypothesis our results using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two centuries clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process the systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean reverting behavior for ppp deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies

unbiased estimation of the half life to ppp convergence in panel data three potential sources of bias introduce complications for panel data estimation of the half life of purchasing power parity deviations they are bias induced by inappropriate cross sectional aggregation of heterogeneous coefficients small sample estimation bias of dynamic lag coefficients and bias induced by time aggregation of commodity prices all of these biases have been addressed individually in the literature in this paper we address all three biases in arriving at our estimates using an annual panel data set of cpi based real exchange rates for 21 oecd countries from 1973 to 1998 we obtain a point estimate of the unbiased half life of 3 0 years with a 95 confidence interval of 2 3 4 2 years

estimating the return to endogenous schooling decisions via conditional second moments this paper employs conditional second moments to identify the impact of education in wage regressions where education is treated as endogenous this approach avoids the use of instrumental variables in a setting where instruments are frequently not available we employ this methodology to estimate the returns to schooling for a sample of australian workers we find that accounting for the endogeneity of education in this manner increases the estimated return to education from 6 percent to 10 percent

nominal shocks and real exchange rates evidence from two centuries abstract this paper employs structural vector autoregression methods to examine the contribution of real and nominal shocks to real exchange rate movements using two hundred and seventeen years of data from britain and the united states shocks are identified with long run restrictions the long time series makes possible an investigation of how the role of nominal shocks has evolved over time due to changes in the shock processes or to structural changes in the economy which might alter how a shock is transmitted to the real exchange rate the sample is split at 1913 which is the end of the classical gold standard period the last of the monetary regimes of the 19th century the earlier subsample 1795 1913 shows a much stronger role for nominal shocks in explaining real exchange rate movements than the later subsample 1914 2010 counterfactual analysis shows that the difference between the two periods is mainly due to the size of the nominal shocks rather than structural changes in the economy these findings are consistent with the view that the financial instability and frequent deflation of the 19th century had real economic effects