what determines female autonomy evidence from bangladesh abstract this paper examines the determinants of female autonomy within households in a developing country in particular we investigate the relative contributions of earned versus unearned income in enhancing women s autonomy and the role of employment outside of their husband s farm in a simple theoretical model it is demonstrated that earned income could be more important than unearned income in empowering women using data from rural bangladesh empirical estimations confirm this prediction and also reveal the surprising fact that it is not employment per se but employment outside their husbands farms that contributes to women s autonomy the data also point to the importance of choosing the correct threat point in theoretical analyses of female autonomy

retail bank deposits as quasi fixed factors of production neoclassical models of the banking firm for example michael klein 1971 treat all deposit liabilities as fully variable factors of production banks then maximize profits minimize liability costs by equating the marginal costs of all liability types during each period the empirical relevance of these models is difficult to establish because binding deposit rate ceilings regulation q force bank competition for many retail deposits into implicit interest channels that are not readily measured it is therefore noteworthy that during two recent periods when deposit rate ceilings were not binding banks paid retail deposit rates considerably in excess of the rate at which they could borrow via large unregulated certificates of deposit such behavior seems inconsistent with the cost minimization prescribed by neoclassical bank models however if retail deposit accounts are interpreted as quasi fixed gary becker 1962 walter oi 1962 donald parsons 1972 sherwin rosen 1968 inputs to the banking firm these important historical observations can be reconciled with bank profit maximization this paper first describes two historical episodes during which the bank retail deposit rate exceeded the negotiable certificate of deposit rate for substantial periods of time while no profit maximizing cost minimizing bank would pay such a rate differential if retail deposit quantities are costlessly variable interpreting retail deposit accounts as quasi fixed inputs to the bank explains the peculiar rate structures a simple two period model of bank liability selection formalizes the analysis i two puzzling historical episodes

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

endogenous intra household balance of power and its impact on expenditure patterns evidence from india this paper extends the collective approach to household behaviour by proposing and estimating a model in which the weights attached to individual members are endogenously determined the estimation is conducted using two different data sets from three indian states we find that relative bargaining power of the adult decision makers has a statistically significant effect on the budget share of an item and that the effects are typically nonlinear and vary significantly across items this implies that household welfare is better protected in households where bargaining power is spread evenly between the spouses than where one partner enjoys a dominant position

central local relations in china during the reform era the economic and institutional dimensions abstract central local relations are a core but problematic issue in china s reform process the conventional wisdom is that the economic reforms have considerably weakened control by the central government over economic activities in the localities political implications are derived directly from these economic observations the prevalent view is that the economic reforms have reduced the political control of the center and indeed have called into question the viability of china as a single political entity this article disputes these views it shows that economic decentralization has been accompanied by a strengthening of china s unitary political system this has direct bearings on local economic conduct because of the political and institutional constraints local officials surrender tax revenues to the central government and curb their inflationary investment demand

terror as a bargaining instrument a case study of dowry violence in rural india this ethnographic study examined the sociocultural context of domestic violence and dowry in india and describes a theoretical model and econometric methodology the model was tested with survey data collected from a sub caste of 149 potter families from 3 villages in karnataka state in south india interviews were conducted among 139 adult married women and 130 married men the case studies demonstrate that violence can be used as a way to redistribute resources bargaining over dowry amounts occurs twice once before the marriage and renegotiations after the wife had moved to the husbands family domestic violence may be a weapon in order to obtain higher transfers at the renegotiation stage the model assumes that the level of dowry and the occurrence of violence are determined simultaneously hypotheses tested whether increases in husbands family wealth in the dowry paid and husbands cost of violent behavior reduces the incidence of violence tests determined whether increases in wifes familys wealth and increases in wifes human capital husbands human capital or wifes cost of violence increase violence 23 reported wife beating at some time a 10000 rupee increase in the wifes parents income increased the risk of violence by 4 a 10000 rupee increase in the husbands parents income reduced the risk of violence by 10 a 10000 rupee increase in dowry reduced the risk by 5 an additional male child reduced the risk by 11 female sterilization increased the risk by 16 findings suggest that husbands beat wives when the wifes family is rich and when dowries are small

understanding the behavior of bank spreads in latin america abstract over the last decade many countries in latin america have eliminated interest rate ceilings reduced reserve requirements and stopped direct credit controls these market oriented reforms have encouraged financial deepening thereby producing considerable economic benefits to the countries nevertheless the persistence of high interest rate spreads has been a disquieting outcome of the reforms this paper explores the determinants of bank spreads in a systematic way for argentina bolivia chile colombia mexico peru and uruguay during the mid 1990s the analysis shows that high operating costs raise spreads as do high levels of non performing loans although the size of these effects differs across the countries in addition reserve requirements in a number of countries still act as a tax on banks that gets translated into a higher spread beyond bank specific variables uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment facing banks appears to increase interest spreads the combination of these microeconomic and macroeconomic factors is a cause for concern in latin america as spreads widen the cost of using the financial system becomes prohibitive to some potential borrowers in addition the results suggest that bank capital requirements may not prevent excessive risk taking by banks when bank spreads are high

empowering women inheritance rights female education and dowry payments in india this paper examines the impact of gender progressive reforms to the inheritance law in india on women s outcomes despite stipulating that daughters would have equal shares as sons in ancestral property i find that the reform failed to increase the actual likelihood of women inheriting property instead parents appear to be gifting their share of land to their sons in order to circumvent the law however parents also appear to be compensating their daughters for such disinheritance by giving them alternative transfers in the form of either higher dowries or more education following the reform

the role of financial sector competition for monetary policy in this paper we examine the impact of competition in the banking industry on financial market activity in particular we explore this issue in a setting where banks simultaneously insure individuals against liquidity risk and offer loans to promote intertemporal consumption smoothing in addition spatial separation and private information generate a transactions role for money interestingly we demonstrate that the industrial organization of the financial system bears significant implications for the effects of monetary policy under perfect competition higher rates of money growth lead to lower interest rates and a higher volume of lending activity in contrast in a monopoly banking sector money growth restricts the availability of funds and raises the cost of borrowing

market structure and the nature of price rigidity evidence from the market for consumer deposits panel data on consumer bank deposit interest rates reveal asymmetric impacts of market concentration on the dynamic adjustment of prices to shocks banks in concentrated markets are slower to raise interest rates on deposits in response to rising market interest rates but are faster to reduce them in response to declining market interest rates thus banks with market power skim off surplus on movements in both directions since deposit interest rates are inversely related to the price charged by banks for deposits the results suggest that downward price rigidity and upward price flexibility are a consequence of market concentration

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

gender neutral inheritance laws family structure and women s status in india this paper examines whether economic empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their marital household and investigates the mechanism by exploiting variation from a legal reform aimed at improving women s inheritance rights in india results suggest that the reform increased women s participation in decision making but at the expense of the older generation of household members and not at the expense of their husbands two channels are proposed to explain this phenomenon first this can be driven by a shift in the family structure from traditional joint families to nuclear households such a change is consistent both with the increase in women s decision making authority which they can exert to move out of the joint household as well as with men s incentives since men have weaker financial links with their parents post reform second even within joint families the amendments empowered young couples at the expense of the older generation of household members

how do anticipated changes to short term market rates influence banks retail interest rates evidence from the four major euro area economies in this paper we argue that banks anticipate short term market rates when setting interest rates on loans and deposits in order to include anticipated rates in an empirical model we use two methods to forecast market rates a level slope curvature model and a principal components model before including them in a model of retail rate adjustment for four retail rates in four major euro area economies using both aggregate data and data from individual french banks we find a significant role for forecasts of market rates in determining retail rates alternative specifications with futures information yield comparable results

are there asymmetries in the response of bank interest rates to monetary shocks this article examines the velocity and asymmetry of the response of bank interest rates to monetary policy shocks using an asymmetric vector error correction model it analyses the pass through of changes in money market rates to retail bank interest rates in italy in the period 1985 2002 the main results of the article are 1 the speed of adjustment of bank interest rates to monetary policy changes increased significantly after the introduction of the 1993 consolidated law on banking 2 interest rate adjustment in response to positive and negative shocks is asymmetric in the short run but not in the long run 3 banks adjust their loan deposit rate faster during periods of monetary tightening easing 4 this asymmetry almost vanished since the 1990s

unintended consequences of women s inheritance rights on female mortality in india abstractbefore 2005 most states of india only gave sons the legal right to inherit their parents ancestral land however five states in india had legal reforms giving daughters the same inheritance rights as sons this article examines the impact of these reforms on female child mortality and fertility a model shows that if parents desire to maximize their bequest per son then giving daughters inheritance rights increases the cost of daughters causing parents to reduce investment in their daughters health or decrease fertility a difference in difference analysis shows that the reforms caused an increase in female child mortality but had no effect on fertility rates

bank deposit rate clustering theory and empirical evidence the market prices of stocks and other assets tend to cluster on round fractions a similar clustering is found in the interest rates paid on retail bank deposits however the theoretical rationales given for asset price clustering are incompatible with the clustering of retail deposit rates this paper proposes a theory based on depositors limited recall it shows that when banks exploit this phenomenon deposit rates will tend to be set at round fractions and will be relatively sticky at these levels the implications of this theoretical model are tested using money market deposit account and retail certificate of deposit interest rate data from a sample of more than 500 banks

liquidity risk and financial competition implications for asset prices and monetary policy abstract this paper studies the implications of banking competition for capital markets and monetary policy in particular i develop a two sector monetary growth model in which a group of agents is exposed to liquidity shocks and money is essential banks insure depositors against such risk and invest in the economy s assets in this setting i compare an economy with a perfectly competitive banking sector to an economy with a fully concentrated financial sector unlike previous work banks can have market power in both deposits and capital markets compared to a perfectly competitive financial sector i demonstrate that a monopolistic banking system can have substantial adverse consequences on capital formation assets prices and the degree of risk sharing furthermore multiple steady states can emerge and the economy becomes subject to poverty traps more importantly market power in financial markets may overturn the tobin effect present under a perfectly competitive financial sector this necessarily happens in economies with high degrees of liquidity risk and low levels of capital formation

deposit banks and the market for payment media this paper develops a model of bank deposit pricing with optimal consumer choices of spending shares among alternative media of exchange interpreting deposits as a tie in feature of the sale of bank payment services the paper shows that the wedge between consumer and social costs of currency use may reverse typical prescriptions regarding bank market structure and distortionary taxes on banks an explanation is offered for below cost bank service fees despite deregulated deposit interest rates while rate ceilings are shown to induce substitution into payment media with higher social costs copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

imperfect competition in bank retail markets deposit and loan rate dynamics and incomplete pass through this paper examines determinants of pass through from the market interest rate to bank retail deposit and loan rates a dynamic adjustment cost model with imperfect competition implies that these rates depend on own lagged values and on lagged current and expected future values of the security rate greater competition in retail markets reduces the impact of lagged and expected rates on current retail rates while raising the effect of the current security rate yielding greater pass through these results have important implications for both the specifications used in empirical work and biases introduced into estimates of pass through effects

money and asset prices in a cash in advance economy an asset pricing model with money introduced via a cash in advance constraint is presented the monetary velocity is variable hence money demand does not obey the trivial quantity equation the effects of disturbances in output and money growth on real balances the price level and interest rates are examined monetary policy has effects on real asset prices the fisher relation and the premium on nominal bonds are discussed the precise role of the timing of information and transactions for properties of price levels and interest rates are clarified

territorial competition in china and the west chien s s and gordon i territorial competition in china and the west regional studies in modern western societies and most other economies to which it has spread territorial economic competition is associated with a combination of competitive electoral politics and private land ownership in mainland china however a very strong form of this competition has emerged without either of these supports in general the development of such local collective action and its particular effects reflect an interaction between materially interested local agents and structural pressures the difference in china is that these agents are principally local government leaders whose career prospects within a still centralized system depend upon performance in terms of economic criteria set from above chien s s et gordon i la competition territoriale en chine et dans l ouest regional studies dans les societes occidentales d aujourd hui et dans la plupart des autres economies auxquelles elle s est etendue la

marriage institutions and sibling competition evidence from south asia using data from south asia this article examines how arranged marriage cultivates rivalry among sisters during marriage search parents with multiple daughters reduce the reservation quality for an older daughters groom rushing her marriage to allow sufficient time to marry off her younger sisters relative to younger brothers younger sisters increase a girls marriage risk relative to younger singleton sisters younger twin sisters have the same effect these effects intensify in marriage markets with lower sex ratios or greater parental involvement in marriage arrangements in contrast older sisters delay a girls marriage because girls leave school when they marry and face limited earning opportunities when they reach adulthood the number of sisters has well being consequences over the life cycle younger sisters cause earlier school leaving lower literacy a match to a husband with less education and a less skilled occupation and marginally lower adult economic status data from a broader set of countries indicate that these cross sister pressures on marriage age are common throughout the developing world although the schooling costs vary by setting

how the chinese government promoted a global automobile industry the claim by china experts that the chinese state lacks the capability to practice pro active industrial policy throws china s future into doubt this article argues the contrary by examining the development of the chinese automobile industry and the evolution of its industrial policy since 1978 the central state s policy may have been ineffective at first but continued to improve layer by layer by taking into account results of local experiments and being propelled by a strong catch up consensus providing performance standards to establish national industries china s learning process thus renders its industrial policy model effective in the long term copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

economic development as self discovery in the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated we develop a general equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical and normative issues we highlight two failures of the laissez faire outcome there is too little investment and entrepreneurship ex ante and too much production diversification ex post optimal policy consists of counteracting these distortions to encourage investments in the modern sector ex ante but to rationalize production ex post we provide some informal evidence on the building blocks of our model

on cash in advance models of money demand and asset pricing this paper shows how a cash in advance model of money can be written in a way that combines a simple yet empirically defensible money demand function with an asset pricing equation that is similar to the standard barter economy euler equations return premia are determined as in the barter exchange model except that a short term risk free nominal interest rate enters into the first order conditions in special cases asset prices satisfy the barter economy euler equations exactly in the empirical analysis the interest rate factor adds some explanatory power but both the barter and the monetary asset pricing model perform rather poorly copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

is the state led industrial restructuring effective in transition china evidence from the steel sector during the reform era the chinese government has been carrying out strategic industrial policies modelled on those in post war japan and south korea in the hope of transforming its highly fragmented manufacturing sector into one that comprises a small number of internationally competitive big businesses using the evolution of the chinese steel industry structure from the late 1980s to the early 2000s as a case in point this paper finds that the chinese government s consolidation attempts have by and large not been very successful the disappointing policy outcome is interpreted by a detailed examination of the industry policy mechanism in china it is concluded that the institutional framework of the chinese state differs from its counterparts in korea and japan in some fundamental aspects among these the fragmented and uncoordinated chinese bureaucracy contributes significantly to the inefficacy of policy implementation

the development of china s solar photovoltaic industry why industrial policy failed this article studies china s central local government relations in the formation and implementation of an industry policy in china the central government is responsible for policy formation and the local governments are responsible for policy implementation where local governments are allowed ample flexibility in the ways to achieve the policy mandate this arrangement is conducive to local competition but there is no built in mechanism in the system to regulate such competition the system is defective in the execution of an industrial policy in that it fails to discipline the recipients of policy favours and to make efficient exit selections because local competition involves policy resources as well as economic resources the outcome of competition is not necessarily consistent with the comparative advantage of the region the more that policy is emphasised in industrial development the more that competition tends to favour large and rich cities after a certain period of hands off local competition the timing of which is unpredictable but will come when the industry runs into troubles the central government holds the ultimate power to determine the winners the central government typically picks the large and strong firms as the winners which are crowned as a national team and became eligible for further policy support this institutional set up produces a rapidly growing industry which often results in over capacity but not necessarily a competitive industry i use the case of china s solar photovoltaic industry to illustrate these points

multiple competing photovoltaic supply chains modeling analyses and policies abstract many large scale photovoltaic pv energy programs have been launched and developed in the world without a thorough sustainable thinking resulting in an on going misalignment between the demand and supply of the pv systems the global pv industry has encountered a serious oversupply problem causing fierce competitions among the pv supply chains and also led to the dumping accusation and anti dumping trade battles between the pv system importing and exporting countries it is critical to develop better policy and business insights to redirect the current business exchanges and the industry policies for the pv supply chain development this paper attempts to examine theoretically and numerically the business dynamics in a multiple pv supply chain system to acquire better insights and propose appropriate industry policy and business strategy directions for both the governments and businesses this study mimics the contemporary pv supply chains with three supply chain game theoretical models examining the equilibrium conditions of the multiple pv supply chains under cournot competition the numerical and sensitivity analyses of the theoretical supply chain models create several valuable findings on the dynamics regarding the economic decisions of the supply chain members in a pure centralized a pure decentralized and a hybrid multiple supply chain system the quantitative analytical results provide a strong support to the contemporary supply chain theory advocating the world of the business competition has altered to supply chains rather than companies several public and business policy directions are proposed it is suggested that the pv supply chain members should find effective means to form partnership and build up their supply chains which would most likely strengthen their competitiveness in their current markets for governments there are opportunities on both the supply side and the demand side of the pv supply chains to regulate or encourage the pv industry to move toward a healthier industrial structure

public policy and extended families evidence from pensions in south africa how are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies this question is investigated using a unique social experiment the south african pension program under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of africans in south africa the study examines how this transfer affects the labor supply of prime age individuals living with these elderly in extended families it finds a sharp drop in the working hours of prime age individuals in these households when women turn 60 years old or men turn 65 the ages at which they become eligible for pensions it also finds that the drop in labor supply is much larger when the pensioner is a woman suggesting an imperfect pooling of resources the allocation of resources among prime age individuals depends strongly on their absolute age and gender as well as on their relative age the oldest son in the household reduces his working hours more than any other prime age household member

the eurozone deposit rates puzzle choosing the right benchmark this paper proposes an alternative benchmark to the euribor to analyze the post crisis puzzling behavior of deposit rates in the eurozone using bank level cds data for 6 major eurozone countries we build a simple country level index for banks cost of unsecured funding the use of this index instead of the traditionally used euribor restores the cointegration relationship between deposit rates and their reckoned opportunity cost it also suggests that deposits have actually not been significantly over remunerated in most euro area countries since the financial crisis in contrast to what is often argued

retail bank deposit pricing an intertemporal asset pricing approach fundamentally spreads between market and deposit interest rates increase when interest rates rise and decline when rates fall recent empirical studies have found this phenomenon to be related to market concentration static equilibrium models are poorly equipped to explain this behavior in this paper the author applies an intertemporal asset pricing model incorporating bank deposits as a form of money in order to analyze the pricing behavior of a banking sector exercising market power his results extend the theoretical literature on deposit pricing and provide some insights into the behavior of interest rate spreads through time copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

women as agents of change female income and mobility in india economic globalization will give many women in developing countries access to steady and relatively remunerative employment for the first time potentially shifting bargaining power within their households and changing the choices that are made for their children this paper exploits a unique setting a group of tea plantations in south india where women are employed in permanent wage labor and where incomes do not vary by caste to anticipate the impact of globalization on mobility across social groups in the future the main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family s ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone although the paper provides a context specific explanation for why the women from these castes emerge as agents of change the first general implication of the analysis is that the incentive and the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends importantly on their social background the second implication is that historically disadvantaged groups may in fact be especially responsive to new opportunities precisely because they have fewer ties to the traditional economy to hold them back

local governments as industrial firms an organizational analysis of china s transitional economy despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies china s rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises kornai s theory of soft budbet constraints born of the failure of earlier hungarian reforms fosters such skepticism but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises and a greater capacity to monitor them in china s vast public sector the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market oriented firm

the impact of household structure on female autonomy in developing countries abstractjoint household structures in which several generations co reside in a single house are common across developing countries such households may confer benefits on all the family members through household public goods with the patriarch exercising greater control over resources therefore the household structure may affect the bargaining power of its members this paper estimates the effect of joint versus nuclear household structure in india on the autonomy of women and their labour force participation and the heterogeneity in the effects by income caste and region i use an instrumental variable approach and find that women living in nuclear households have greater decision making power

post deregulation bank deposit rate pricing the multivariate dynamics the relationship between wholesale and retail interest rates since deregulation is of substantial interest to economists and policymakers because the predictability of the monetary aggregates and their relationship to bank reserves depend on adjustment patterns in the wholesale and retail money markets we provide evidence on the nature of wholesale retail interest rate relationships by examining the dynamic interactions among two wholesale interest rates federal funds and six month treasury bills and three retail deposit rates six month consumer certificates of deposit money market deposit accounts and super now s we perform a multivariate time series analysis with particular attention paid to causal patterns and the shapes of impulse response functions a number of stylized facts related to size of adjustment speed of adjustment and pattern of adjustment are established for the response of retail rates to unanticipated shocks in wholesale rates

divorce remarriage and child support there is some evidence that children of divorced parents do not perform as well as comparable children in intact families but that this gap declines with the aggregate divorce rate we develop a model in which the higher expectations for remarriage associated with higher divorce rates can trigger an equilibrium in which divorced fathers make more generous transfers that benefit their children and the mother in the aftermath of divorce as a result the welfare loss of children from the separation of their parents can be lower when divorce and remarriage rates rise

the power of tv cable television and women s status in india cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the developing world the availability of cable and satellite television exposes viewers to new information about the outside world which may affect individual attitudes and behaviors this paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural india using a three year individual level panel dataset we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in womens status we find significant increases in reported autonomy decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference we also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility primarily via increased birth spacing the effects are large equivalent in some cases to about five years of education in the cross section and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas we argue that the results are not driven by pre existing differential trends these results have important policy implications as india and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women authors

measuring rents and interest rate risk in imperfect financial markets the case of retail bank deposits traditional measures of interest rate risk assume that prices of financial assets and liabilities are set in perfectly competitive markets however evidence suggests that many retail financial markets do not follow the competitive paradigm in this paper we employ a general contingent claims framework to value rents earned by banks in demandable retail deposit markets our analysis provides a natural and economically meaningful measure of interest rate risk for these imperfectly competitive markets using monthly survey data on now accounts and mmdas we estimate the value of retail deposit rents and deposit durations for more than 200 commercial banks

interest rate pass through and asymmetric adjustment evidence from the federal funds rate operating target period this study examines the long run interest rate pass through of the federal funds rate to the prime rate and whether there is asymmetric adjustment in the prime rate using the enders siklos 2001 momentum threshold autoregressive model over the period february 1987 to october 2005 once allowance is made for the endogenously determined structural break in the cointegrating relationship in april 1996 the adjustment of the prime rate to changes in the federal funds rate appears asymmetric with upward rigidity a result contrary to previous studies which found that the prime rate exhibits downward rigidity the finding of upward rigidity in the prime rate lends support for the customer reaction and adverse selection hypotheses moreover the empirical evidence seems to support the observation of increased pass through as a result of heightened competition in the banking industry as well as the federal reserve s enhanced transparency in monetary policy during the 1990s

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

how does china s industrial policy affect firms r d investment evidence from china manufacturing 2025 aimed at improving innovation capacity and upgrading technology of manufacturing industry china manufacturing 2025 cm2025 which relies on selective industrial policies has attracted great at

intrahousehold bargaining female autonomy and labor supply theory and evidence from india standard models of labor supply predict that unearned income decreases labor supply we propose an alternative noncooperative household model in which a woman s unearned income improves her autonomy within the household which raises her gains from working and can increase her labor supply we find empirical support for this model using women s exposure to the hindu succession act in india as a source of exogenous variation in their unearned income exposure to the hindu succession act increases a woman s labor supply by between 3 8 and 6 1 percentage points particularly into high paying jobs autonomy increased by 0 17 standard deviations suggesting that control of income is a potential channel for these effects thus policies that empower women can have an additional impact on the labor market which can further reinforce autonomy increases

the price concentration relationship in banking the commonly observed positive correlation between market concentration and profitability may be explained by noncompetitive pricing behavior as argued by the structure performance hypothesis or by the greater efficiency of firms with dominant market shares as argued by the efficient structure hypothesis by examining the price concentration relationship instead of the profit concentration relationship this paper tests the structure performance hypothesis in a manner that excludes the efficient structure hypothesis as an alternative explanation of the results the results strongly support the structure performance hypothesis and are robust with respect to model specification measurement of concentration and econometric technique copyright 1989 by mit press

money and banking in a cash in advance economy this paper studies banking and financial innovations in a stochasti c general equilibrium model assuming the existence of two distinct types of goods cash goods which can only be purchased by cash and check goods which can also be purchased by checks drawn against interest bearing bank accounts the authors analyze the effects of changes in the payment s structure i e the share of check goods reserve requirements on banks and changes in the supply of reserves the authors find e g that an increased share of check goods and a decrease of the bank reserve ratio in general both lead to a decrease in the variance of the price level copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

missing women and the price of tea in china the effect of sex specific earnings on sex imbalance economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions this paper uses exogenous increases in sex specific agricultural income caused by post mao reforms in china to estimate the effects of total income and sex specific income on sex differential survival of children increasing female income holding male income constant improves survival rates for girls whereas increasing male income holding female income constant worsens survival rates for girls increasing female income increases educational attainment of all children whereas increasing male income decreases educational attainment for girls and has no effect on boys educational attainment