recent developments in consumer credit risk assessment consumer credit risk assessment involves the use of risk assessment tools to manage a borrower s account from the time of pre screening a potential application through to the management of the account during its life and possible write off the riskiness of lending to a credit applicant is usually estimated using a logistic regression model though researchers have considered many other types of classifier and whilst preliminary evidence suggest support vector machines seem to be the most accurate data quality issues may prevent these laboratory based results from being achieved in practice the training of a classifier on a sample of accepted applicants rather than on a sample representative of the applicant population seems not to result in bias though it does result in difficulties in setting the cut off profit scoring is a promising line of research and the basel 2 accord has had profound implications for the way in which credit applicants are assessed and bank policies adopted

long run effects of public sector sponsored training in west germany between 1991 and 1997 west germany spent on average about 3 6 bn euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed we base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching methods we identify the effects of different types of training programmes over a horizon of more than seven years using bias corrected weighted multiple neighbours matching we find that all programmes have negative effects in the short run and positive effects over a horizon of about four years however for substantive training programmes with duration of about two years gains in employment probabilities of more than 10 points appear to be sustainable but come at the price of large negative lock in effects

does public insurance crowd out private insurance the cost of expanding public sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage we estimate the extent of crowd out arising from the expansions of medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987 1992 period we estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage this occurred largely because employees took up employer based insurance less frequently there is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents

credit scoring for profitability objectives in consumer credit markets lending decisions are usually represented as a set of classification problems the objective is to predict the likelihood of customers ending up in one of a finite number of states such as good bad payer responder non responder and transactor non transactor decision rules are then applied on the basis of the resulting model estimates however this represents a misspecification of the true objectives of commercial lenders which are better described in terms of continuous financial measures such as bad debt revenue and profit contribution in this paper an empirical study is undertaken to compare predictive models of continuous financial behaviour with binary models of customer default the results show models of continuous financial behaviour to outperform classification approaches they also demonstrate that scoring functions developed to specifically optimize profit contribution using genetic algorithms outperform scoring functions derived from optimizing more general functions such as sum of squared error

time to profit scorecards for revolving credit abstract this paper defines and models time to profit for the first time for credit acceptance decisions within the context of revolving credit this requires the definition of a time related event a customer is profitable when monthly cumulative return is at least one i e cumulative profits cover the outstanding balance time to profit scorecards were produced for a data set of revolving credit from a colombian lending institution which included socio demographic and first purchase individual characteristics results show that it is possible to obtain good classification accuracy and improve portfolio returns which are continuous by definition through the use of survival models for binary events i e either being profitable or not it is also shown how predicting time to profit can be used for investment planning purposes of credit programmes it is possible to identify the earliest point in time in which a customer is profitable and hence generates internal organic funds for a credit programme to continue growing and become sustainable for survival models the effect of segmentation on loan duration was explored results were similar in terms of classification accuracy and identifying organic growth opportunities in particular loan duration and credit limit usage have a significant economic impact on time to profit this paper confirms that high risk credit programmes can be profitable at different points in time depending on loan duration furthermore existing customers may provide internal funds for the credit programme to continue growing

labor market opportunities and women s decision making power within households abstract despite the perceived importance of labor market opportunities in shaping married women s outside option and their bargaining power within households as a result this link has received very little empirical attention using longitudinal data on who makes the decision on a wide range of issues within mexican households and data from the administrative records of the mexican social security institute this paper identifies the effects of relative changes in labor market opportunities for men and women on both working and non working women s decision making power i find that increases in labor market opportunities improve women s decision making power as well as children s health using differential labor demand shocks across mexican industries caused by china s admission to the wto gives similar results

education and crime over the life cycle we compare two large scale policy interventions aimed at reducing crime subsidizing high school completion and increasing the length of prison sentences to this purpose we use a life cycle model with endogenous education and crime choices we apply the model to property crime and calibrate it to u s data we find that targeting crime reductions through increases in high school graduation rates entails large efficiency and welfare gains these gains are absent if the same crime reduction is achieved by increasing the length of sentences we also find that general equilibrium effects explain roughly one half of the reduction in crime from subsidizing high school

the central role of noise in evaluating interventions that use test scores to rank schools many programs reward or penalize schools based on students average performance mean reversion is a potentially serious hindrance to the evaluation of such interventions chile s 900 schools program p 900 allocated resources based on cutoffs in schools mean test scores this paper shows that transitory noise in average scores and mean reversion lead conventional estimation approaches to overstate the impacts of such programs it further shows how a regressiondiscontinuity design can be used to control for reversion biases it concludes that p 900 had significant effects on test score gains albeit much smaller than is widely believed

what factors drive individual misperceptions of the returns to schooling in tanzania some lessons for education policy evidence on educational returns and the factors that determine the demand for schooling in developing countries is extremely scarce building on previous studies that show individuals underestimati

real exchange rates under alternative nominal exchange rate systems abstract the paper develops an equilibrium model of the determination of exchange rates the relative price of nontraded goods and the current account the focus is on the effects of various real and nominal disturbances and the conditions under which the nominal exchange rate system is neutral with respect to real variables in the economy the model demonstrates an assymetry in the roles of trade and nontraded goods in affecting exchange rates an econometric investigation of the raltion between the exchange rate system and the variability of real exchange rates provides some evidence against the neutrality hypothesis

the impact of psychological and human capital on wages historically economists have taken the position that psychological capital is either unobservable or immeasurable thus heretofore little evidence has been available on the contribution of psychological capital to wages using data drawn from two different waves of the national longitudinal survey of youth we offer evidence that psychological capital has both a direct effect via self esteem and an indirect effect through locus of control on an individual s real wage we find a person s wage is more sensitive to changes in self esteem than to comparable alterations in human capital both relative wages and human capital contribute to self esteem

long run effects of youth training programs experimental evidence from argentina we study the effect of a job training program for low income youth in cordoba argentina the program included life skills and vocational training as well as internships with private sector employers participants were allocated by means of a public lottery we rely on administrative data on formal employment employment spells and earnings to establish the effects of the program in the short term 18 months but also exceptionally for programs of this type in latin america and in developing countries in general in the medium term 33 months and in the long term 48 months the results indicate sizable gains of about 8 percentage points in formal employment in the short term about 32 higher than the control group although these effects dissipate in the medium and in the long term contrary to previous results for similar programs in the region the effects are substantially larger for men although they also seem to fade in the long run program participants also exhibit earnings about 40 higher than those in the control group and an analysis of bounds indicates that these gains result from both higher employment levels and higher wages the detailed administrative records also allow us to shed some light on the possible mechanisms underlying these effects a dynamic analysis of employment transitions indicates that the program operated through an increase in the persistence of employment rather than from more frequent entries into employment the earnings effect and the higher persistence of employment suggest that the program was successful in increasing the human capital of participants although the transient nature of these results may also reflect better matches from a program induced increase in informal contacts or formal intermediation jel j08 j24 j68 o15

negotiating a better future how interpersonal skills facilitate intergenerational investment using a randomized controlled trial we study whether a negotiation skills training can improve girls educational outcomes in a low resource environment we find that a negotiation training given to eighth grade zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years and these effects did not fade out to better understand mechanisms we estimate the effects of two alternative treatments negotiation had much stronger effects than an informational treatment which had no effect a treatment designed to have more traditional girls empowerment effects had directionally positive but insignificant educational effects relative to this treatment negotiation increased enrollment in higher quality schooling and had larger effects for high ability girls these findings are consistent with a model in which negotiation allows girls to resolve incomplete contracting problems with their parents yielding increased educational investment for those who experience sufficiently high returns we provide evidence for this channel through a lab in the field game and follow up survey with girls and their guardians jel codes d13 i24 j16 o15

caste discrimination in the indian urban labour market abstract this the pioneering quantitative analysis of caste in the indian urban labour market examines the age old problem of caste in the light of discrimination theory and government policy using a survey of workers in delhi the gross wage difference between scheduled untouchable and non scheduled caste is decomposed into its explained and discrimination components and from a model of occupation choice into wage and job discrimination discrimination is found to exist and to operate at least in part through the traditional mechanism viz assignment to jobs with the scheduled castes entering poorly paid dead end jobs it is assisted by methods of recruitment based on contacts prevalent in the manual occupation which also cause past discrimination to carry over to the present its practice serves the economic interests of those who exercise a taste for discrimination

the effect of male migration on employment patterns of women in nepal what is the impact of male migration on the labor market behavior of women in nepal the instrumental variable full information maximum likelihood method is applied to data from the 2004 nepal household survey to account for unobserved factors that could simultaneously affect men s decision to migrate and women s decision to participate in the labor market the results indicate that male migration has a negative impact on the level of the labor market participation by women in the migrant sending household there is evidence of substantial heterogeneity based on both observable and unobservable characteristics in the impact of male migration the findings highlight the important gender dimension of the impact of predominantly male migration on the well being of sending households strategies for economic development in nepal should take into account such gender aspects of the migration dynamics

low schooling for girls slower growth for all cross country evidence on the effect of gender inequality in education on economic development using cross country and panel regressions this article investigates how gender inequality in education affects long term economic growth such inequality is found to have an effect on economic growth that is robust to changes in specifications and controls for potential endogeneities the results suggest that gender inequality in education directly affects economic growth by lowering the average level of human capital in addition growth is indirectly affected through the impact of gender inequality on investment and population growth some 0 4 0 9 percentage points of differences in annual per capita growth rates between east asia and sub saharan africa south asia and the middle east can be accounted for by differences in gender gaps in education between these regions

modelling profitability using survival combination scores abstract the paper presents the first empirical investigation of the relationship between present value of net revenue from a revolving credit account and times to default and to second purchase the analysis is based on the data for a store card which is used to buy white durable goods in germany it is demonstrated that there exists a relationship between the above given measures it appears that there is a scope for improving profit if an application for a store card is assessed by using a model which estimates the revenue and includes the survival probability of default and the survival probability of second purchase a survival combination model rather than merely a static probability of default predicted by a logistic regression

comovements in budget deficits money interest rates exchange rates and the current account balance some empirical evidence most applications of structural vars and cointegration to the study of the short and long run relationships among macroeconomic variables in an open economy context do not include budget deficits or fiscal innovations as one of the key variables this paper attempts to rectify this omission by incorporating budget deficits into the analysis of the comovements in macroeconomic variables budget deficits money interest rates exchange rates and the current account balance in the short and long runs using a var approach empirical results suggest that a larger proportion of variations in the interest rate differential between financial centres as well as of variations current account balances of countries are accounted for by monetary innovations rather than by fiscal innovations however fluctuations in real exchange rates are better explained by fiscal innovations

do labor market opportunities affect young women s work and family decisions experimental evidence from india do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions we provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry because the industry was so new at the time of the study there was almost no awareness of these jobs allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women s labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households we find that young women in treatment villages were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training women also report wanting to have fewer children and to work more steadily throughout their lifetime consistent with increased aspirations for a career copyright 2012 oxford university press

the value of bilingualism in the u s labor market much is surmised but little is known about the value of bilingualism in today s u s economy the authors use the national adult literacy survey nals to provide the first rigorous estimates of t

do wage subsidies provide a stepping stone to employment for recent college graduates evidence from a randomized experiment in jordan abstract this study examines the impact of a randomized experiment in jordan in which female community college graduates were assigned to receive a wage subsidy voucher the wage voucher led to a 38 percentage point increase in employment in the short run but the average effect is much smaller and no longer statistically significant after the voucher period has expired the extra job experience gained as a result of the wage subsidy does not provide a stepping stone to new jobs for these recent graduates which appears to be due to productivity levels not rising above a binding minimum wage

assisting the transition from workfare to work a randomized experiment randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare dependent region of argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy a second sample also received the option of skill training while a third sample formed the control group the authors analyze the effects of this scheme on participants employment and income using double difference and instrumental variables methods to deal with potential experimental biases including selective compliance with the randomized assignment the authors find that compared with the control group voucher recipients had a significantly higher probability of employment though their current incomes were no higher the impact was largely confined to women and younger workers labor supply effects appear to have been important however training had no significant impact the experiment was cost effective in reducing the government s welfare spending since take up of the subsidy by employers was low

vocational training programs and youth labor market outcomes evidence from nepal abstract lack of skills is arguably one of the most important determinants of high levels of unemployment and poverty in response policymakers often initiate vocational training programs in effort to enhance skill formation among the youth using a regression discontinuity design we examine a large youth training intervention in nepal we find twelve months after the start of the training program that the intervention generated an increase in non farm employment of 10 percentage points itt estimates and up to 31 percentage points for program compliers late estimates we also detect sizeable gains in monthly earnings women who start self employment activities inside their homes largely drive these impacts we argue that low baseline educational levels and non farm employment levels and nepal s social and cultural norms towards women drive our large program impacts our results suggest that the program enables otherwise underemployed women to earn an income while staying at home close to household errands and in line with the socio cultural norms that prevent them from taking up employment outside the house

earnings and caste an evaluation of caste wage differentials in the nepalese labour market abstractthis paper examines the sources of wage differentials among castes in nepal a country which had until 1963 an age old caste based social division of labour we use an extended oaxaca decomposition model with occupation and firm size augmenting the conventionally used measures of human capital endowments our results indicate that caste wage differentials in nepal are large and that human capital endowments and lack of access to better paying occupations and larger firms have a significant impact furthermore we find mixed evidence that the government policy of affirmative action has narrowed down the caste wage differential

comovements of budget deficits exchange rates and outputs of traded and non traded goods i introduction the total united states budget deficit was roughly zero at the beginning of 1981 after some ups and downs the deficit reached 140 billion in early 1985 and remained high compared to deficit levels experienced in peacetime years prior to 1981 during the period 1981 1985 the u s dollar appreciated sharply relative to foreign currencies in both nominal and real terms the current account of the u s balance of payments moved from a surplus of 6 0 billion in 1981 into a series of large recurrent deficits reaching an annual rate of 120 billion by mid 1985 the simultaneous occurrence of these events suggests that budget deficits cause a country s currency to appreciate which in turn reduces the country s international competitiveness stories are reported in the popular financial press and conventional wisdom is used to link these events using the identities of national income accounts it is shown that budget deficits must crowd out domestic spending by raising the domestic saving investment gap in addition the deficits can be financed by the rest of the world through the generation of a deficit in the current account of the balance of payments typically it is argued that the rise in the rate of interest and real appreciation of the dollar are necessary in order to bring about the saving investment gap and the current account deficit needed to finance the large u s budget deficits this paper attempts to provide an alternative structural explanation of these comovements in exchange rates and government budget deficits my model expands on previous work to include fiscal policy considerations in a stochastic setup it shows that within a simple two country cash in advance constraint model it is possible to have a positive correlation between increases in the budget deficit and exchange rate appreciation additionally it is possible to have a negative correlation between exchange rate appreciation and a reduction in domestic traded goods production the implication then is that the usual twin deficits argument about the linkages between budget deficits exchange rates and trade deficits is only one of a number of possible explanations of the correlations that appear in the data of the 1980s the model i have used in this paper is as far as i know the first international general equilibrium monetary asset pricing model with endogenous budget deficits most of the explanations that relate exchange rates and the federal government s budget deficit or the trade deficit are based on a particular disequilibrium theory of exchange rates the model of this paper however is based on an equilibrium model of exchange rates it is based on simple economic principles it uses the national accounts definition of the government s nominal budget deficit as an increase in the dollar value of the government s holdings of money and bonds a change in the domestic productivity of traded goods and the money supply yields a change in both the nominal price of bonds and the government budget deficit a change in the supply of domestically produced traded goods also yields changes in their relative price the real exchange rate repeated disturbances to the supply of traded goods and the money supply create a correlation between budget deficits and real exchange rates recently branson and love 1988 and ceglowski 1989 among others blame the real exchange rate as the primary cause of u s industries weak performance in the 1980s it is important to realize the real exchange rate itself is an endogenous variable its behavior as i will show is a result of underlying economic changes hence it is incorrect to blame decreased u s competitiveness on the real exchange rate moreover most popular models which presume a relationship between budget deficits and real exchange rates attribute no role to the monetary sector this paper demonstrates the importance of bringing both monetary and real sectors into the model in order to analyze such relationships

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

general education versus vocational training evidence from an economy in transition abstract this paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training during romania s transition to a market economy we examine a 1973 educational reform that shifted a large proportion of students from vocational training to general education using census and household survey data we analyze the effect of this policy with a regression discontinuity design we find that men affected by the policy are significantly less likely to work in manual or craft related occupations but have similar levels of labor market participation and earnings compared to their counterparts unaffected by the policy we conclude that differences in labor market returns between graduates of vocational and general schools are largely driven by selection

does head start improve children s life chances evidence from a regression discontinuity design this paper exploits a new source of variation in head start funding to identify the program s effects on health and schooling in 1965 the office of economic opportunity oeo provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop head start proposals the result was a large and lasting discontinuity in head start funding rates at the oeo cutoff for grant writing assistance we find evidence of a large drop at the oeo cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by head start as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment i introduction head start was established in 1965 as part of the war on poverty to provide preschool health and other social services to poor children age three to five and their families and currently serves over 900 000 children each year at a cost of around 7 billion hhs 2006 this paper provides new evidence on the effects of the head start program on schooling and health by drawing on a new source of variation in program funding spe

multistage decision making fuzzy methodology for optimal investments based on experts evaluations abstract a new methodology of making a decision on an optimal investment in several projects is proposed the methodology is based on experts evaluations and consists of three stages in the first stage kaufmann s expertons method is used to reduce a possibly large number of applicants for credit using the combined expert data the credit risk level is determined for each project only the projects with low risks are selected in the second stage the model of refined decisions is constructed using the new modification of the previously proposed possibilistic discrimination analysis method sirbiladze khutsisvili dvalishvili 2010 this stage is based on expert knowledge and experience the projects selected in the first stage are compared in order to identify high quality ones among them the possibility levels of experts preferences are calculated and the projects are ranked finally the third stage deals with the bicriteria discrete optimization problem whose solution makes it possible to arrange the most advantageous investment in several projects simultaneously the decision on funding the selected projects is made and an optimal distribution of the allocated investment amount among them is provided the efficiency of the proposed methodology is illustrated by an example

cointegration and exchange rate dynamics abstract we utilize systems methods of estimation which impose the unit root structure to estimate both the long run equilibrium relationship the cointegrating vector and the short run dynamics of an open economy macroeconomic model in which the exchange rate and the domestic price level are endogenously determined for the united states the model is estimated over the flexible exchange rate period and over two sub periods chosen by structural change tests on the exchange rate both rational and theories consistent expectations are utilized the models with theories consistent expectations outperform those with rational expectations

the impact of vocational training for the unemployed experimental evidence from turkey this brief summarizes the updates from the 2014 paper entitled the impact of vocational training for the unemployed experimental evidence from turkey conducted between between 2010 and 2011 in turkey a randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large scale active labor market policy turkey s vocational training programs for the unemployed a detailed follow up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity the average impact of training on employment is positive but close to zero and statistically insignificant which is much lower than either program officials or applicants expected over the first year after training the paper finds that training had statistically significant effects on the quality of employment and that the positive impacts are stronger when training is offered by private providers however longer term administrative data show that after three years these effects have also dissipated

development and application of consumer credit scoring models using profit based classification measures abstract this paper presents a new approach for consumer credit scoring by tailoring a profit based classification performance measure to credit risk modeling this performance measure takes into account the expected profits and losses of credit granting and thereby better aligns the model developers objectives with those of the lending company it is based on the expected maximum profit emp measure and is used to find a trade off between the expected losses driven by the exposure of the loan and the loss given default and the operational income given by the loan additionally one of the major advantages of using the proposed measure is that it permits to calculate the optimal cutoff value which is necessary for model implementation to test the proposed approach we use a dataset of loans granted by a government institution and benchmarked the accuracy and monetary gain of using emp accuracy and the area under the roc curve as measures for selecting model parameters and for determining the respective cutoff values the results show that our proposed profit based classification measure outperforms the alternative approaches in terms of both accuracy and monetary value in the test set and that it facilitates model deployment

all school finance equalizations are not created equal school finance equalization has probably affected american schools more than any other reform of the last 30 years understanding it is a prerequisite for making optimal social investments in human capital yet it is poorly understood in this paper i explain why it differs from conventional redistribution because it is based on property values which are endogenous to schools productivity taste for education and the school finance system itself i characterize equalization schemes and show why some level down and others level up schemes that strongly level down have unintended consequences even poor districts can end up worse off i also show how school finance equalization affects property prices private school attendance and student achievement

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site