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

oil price volatility and the asymmetric response of gasoline prices to oil price increases and decreases this paper analyzes the effect of volatility in oil prices on the degree of asymmetry in the response of gasoline prices to oil price increases and decreases several time series measures of the asymmetry between the responses of gasoline prices to oil price increases and decreases and several measures of the oil price volatility are constructed in all models the degree of asymmetry in gasoline prices declines with an increase in oil price volatility the results support the oligopolistic coordination theory as a likely explanation of the observed asymmetry and are not consistent with the standard search theory and the search theory with bayesian updating

take or pay contract robustness a three step story told by the brazil bolivia gas case abstract neo institutional economics nei has long shown that take or pay top long term contracts provide a robust framework for safeguarding the interests of both upstream and downstream parties in the gas industry the case of gas trade between brazil and bolivia presents an opportunity to re examine empirically and to review the robust nature of the top framework over time this case reveals that the positions of the contractors actually change giving rise to a veritable lifecycle of the contractual arrangement such a contract can be seen to span three successive phases the first phase of the contract cycle begins when it is signed allowing the investments to begin the second phase starts when investments have been completed and the actual trade in gas begins the third phase of the contract cycle comes when the increasing flow of gas comes close to saturating capacity and the volume levels for downstream market volume have been reached these three contract phases are thus distinguished by how robust the alignment of the parties interests is the added value of the paper is then both empirical and analytical the case study provides a brand new lifecycle analysis of the performance of top long term contracting into an nei framework

what can be learned from the free destination option in the lng imbroglio we examine the profitability of flexible routing by lng cargoes for a single supplier taking into account uncertainty in the medium term dynamics of gas markets first we model the trajectory of natural gas prices in asia northern america and europe using a threshold vector autoregression representation tvar in which the system s dynamics switches back and forth between high and low regimes of oil price volatility we then use the generalized impulse response functions girf obtained from the estimated threshold model to analyze the effects of volatility shocks on the regional gas markets dynamics lastly the valuation of destination flexibility in lng supplies is conducted using a real option approach we generate a sample of possible future regional price trajectories using monte carlo simulations of our empirical model and determine for each trajectory the optimal shipping decisions and their profitability our results portend a substantial source of profit for the industry and reveal future movements of vessels we discuss the conditional impact of destination flexibility on the globalization of natural gas markets

oil indexation market fundamentals and natural gas prices an investigation of the asian premium in natural gas trade abstract a heated debate has arisen over whether the asian premium i e higher prices in asia than elsewhere in natural gas trade is due to price discrimination or different market fundamentals determining the origin of this premium can help to guide the gas industries and policy makers in asia especially when the traditional oil indexed price mechanism fades away using a new systemic time series approach this paper explores the extent to which oil prices and market fundamentals contribute to variations in gas prices in japan the united states and germany we find clear cross country differences and time varying patterns gas prices are much less affected by supply and demand factors than oil prices in japan and germany whereas these factors are more important than oil prices in the us market which has a pricing hub through rolling windows and subsample analysis we discover that oil prices were important in japan and germany but the level of importance has declined significantly in recent years though the contribution of fundamentals does not change much the results show that asian gas prices are determined more by oil prices than by the market fundamentals thus the asian premium is more likely due to this oil indexed pricing mechanism rather than market fundamentals this suggests that developing asia s benchmark prices through trading hubs with a better reflection of regional specific fundamentals can lead to a more efficient allocation of gas resources

information transmission and market interactions across the atlantic an empirical study on the natural gas market abstract this paper studies the international information transmission and market interactions in the u s and u k natural gas markets three well documented approaches are used to measure the relative importance on the process of price discovery under a quadvariate system after adjusting the effects of nonsynchronous trading prices robust results indicate our system that includes spot and futures prices within the two countries are driven by one common factor information disseminates efficiently among the four markets concerned the u s futures market dominates as the center for price discovery the u k futures market comes as the second the spot markets in the u s and u k are less efficient than their corresponding futures market where the u k spot market contributes the least and almost zero to the price discovery process asymmetric volatility spillovers are found in three of the four markets volatility in the u s futures market increases with positive returns which illustrates the inverse leverage effect in most of the commodity market volatilities in the spot markets are negatively related to returns which is analogous to the traditional leverage effect prevailing in most of the equity stock markets

cooperation among liquefied natural gas suppliers is rationalization the sole objective this paper examines the development of cooperative strategies between countries exporting liquefied natural gas lng and members of the gas exporting countries forum gecf this economic study focuses specifically on an often raised scenario the emergence of a cooperative approach designed with the sole aim of logistic rationalization and which would not have any effect on lng prices we first assess the annual gains that may result from this market power free cooperative approach using a simple static transportation model the numerical results obtained suggest that in the absence of a gain redistribution policy this cooperative strategy will probably not be adopted because cooperation would not be a rational move for some exporters the problem of gain sharing is then formulated using cooperative game theory concepts several gain sharing methods have been studied including the shapley value and various nucleolus inspired concepts our results suggest that the choice of a redistribution policy appears relatively restricted out of the methods studied only one per capita nucleolus satisfies two key requirements core belonging and monotonicity in the aggregate lastly we look at how cooperation may give rise to a coordination cost and try to determine the maximum amount of this cost in view of the low level of this amount and the relative complexity of the sharing method implemented we consider that the credibility of a logistic cooperation scenario exempt from market power should be reappraised

credit and economic activity credit regimes and nonlinear propagation of shocks in this paper we examine empirically whether credit plays a role as a nonlinear propagator of shocks this propagation takes the form of a threshold vector autoregression in which a regime change occurs if credit conditions cross a critical threshold using nonlinear impulseresponse functions we evaluate the dynamics implied by the threshold model these suggest that shocks have a larger effect on output in the tight credit regime than is normally the case and that contractionary monetary shocks typically have a larger effect than expansionary shocks finally using a nonlinear version of historical decompositions we attempt to determine the relative contribution to output growth of shocks and the nonlinear structure

a multiattribute model of consumer choice during product learning the processes of consumer preference formation during product learning are analyzed a hypothesis about how individuals form attribute expectations is used to derive a dynamic multinomial logit model of individual choice which endogenously recognizes product learning the model and its underlying assumptions are then tested in the context of an interactive grocery store learning game the results support most elements of the proposed model structure an assumption of temporal stationarity in attribute salience however could not be supported approaches to implementation of the model are discussed and implications for marketing management and research in individual choice modeling are addressed

mitigating contractual hazards unilateral options and contract length in this article we consider the ways in which the desire for efficient low cost adaptation to change influences the tradeoff between the design and duration of long term contractual relationships we examine the distortions in contract terms occasioned by nonprice competition for natural gas in the presence of wellhead price regulation deviations from optimal contract incentives significantly raise the cost of being bound to long term agreements and shorten the duration of contracts the approach we adopt suggests a method for empirically assessing the efficiency of alternative contracting practices and legal standards

have oil and gas prices got separated abstract this paper applies vector error correction models that show that oil and natural gas prices decoupled around 2009 before 2009 us and uk gas prices had a long term equilibrium with crude prices to which gas prices always reverted after exogenous shocks both us and uk gas prices adjusted to the crude oil price individually and departure from the equilibrium gas price on one continent resulted in a similar departure on the other after an exogenous shock the adjustment between us and uk gas prices took approximately 20 weeks on average and the convergence was mediated mainly by crude oil with a necessary condition that arbitrage across the atlantic was possible after 2009 however the uk gas price has remained integrated with oil price but the us gas price decoupled from crude oil price and the european gas price as the atlantic arbitrage has halted the oversupply from shale gas production has not been mitigated by north american export as there has been no liquefying and export capacity

lng is linking regional natural gas markets evidence from the gravity model abstract evidence exists that global natural gas markets have become more integrated over time one possible explanation for this increased level of integration is that increased liquefied natural gas trade has increased the opportunity for price arbitrage by decreasing transport costs if this explanation is true then the natural gas market should become relatively more integrated because countries separated by large distances would be more willing to trade with each other we employ a gravity model to test whether trade in liquefied natural gas has helped to de regionalize the total natural gas market using trade in the compressed natural gas market as a comparison benchmark the results indicate that liquefied natural gas is indeed a global commodity whereas the compressed natural gas markets are more regional importantly we find that trade in liquefied natural gas has de regionalized the total natural gas market

beyond baseline and follow up the case for more t in experiments the vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow up survey if multiple follow ups are conducted the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects so that in effect only one follow up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest while such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits household incomes and expenditures and episodic health outcomes taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise increasing power when the outcomes have low autocorrelation it can make sense to do no baseline at all moreover the author shows how for such outcomes more power can be achieved with multiple follow ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow up and baseline the analysis highlights the large gains in power from ancova rather than difference in differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken the paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non experimental impact evaluations

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

real option valuation of free destination in long term liquefied natural gas supplies this paper presents a real option model for the valuation of destination flexibility in long term lng supplies stochastic price dynamics in the different markets is modelled through geometric brownian motion processes mean reversion is considered as well as correlation between markets but instead of the usual correlation in return shocks a price convergence term is introduced representing the arbitrage streams between markets model parameters are estimated from market data on lng prices by maximum log likelihood the goodness of the fit for the proposed model is tested as well as for two alternative models confidence intervals for the parameters are given results for the model are calculated by monte carlo simulation frequency distributions for the main results are plotted the effect of the main parameters of the model is studied i e price volatilities price convergence initial prices in the markets mean reversion extra transportation costs number of alternative markets the value of destination flexibility is found to be an important share of the value of lng

welfare consequences of food prices increases evidence from rural mexico this paper presents an analysis of the welfare consequences of recent increases in food prices in mexico using micro level data we estimate a quaids model of demand for food using data collected to evaluate the conditional cash transfer program oportunidades we show how the poor have been affected by the recent increases and changes in relative prices of foods we also show how a conditional cash transfer program provides a means of alleviating the problem of increasing staple prices and simulate the impact of such a policy on household welfare and consumer demand we contrast this policy with alternative policy responses such as price subsidies which distort relative prices and are less well targeted

reverse globalization does high oil price volatility discourage international trade this paper examines whether higher oil price volatility causes a reversal in globalization using a large annual panel data set covering 84 countries all over the world from 1984 to 2008 we investigate the impacts of oil price fluctuations on international trade namely exports and imports we present strong and robust evidence that international trade flows will be lower when oil prices fluctuate significantly we therefore conclude that oil price volatility hurts globalization

food and cash transfers evidence from colombia we study food engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in colombia after controlling for the endogeneity of total consumption and for the price variability across villages our estimates imply that an increase in consumption by 10 would lead to a decrease of 1 in the share of food however quasi experimental estimates of the impact of the programme show that the share of food increases this result is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the programme could increase the bargaining power of women inducing a more than proportional increase in food consumption

spousal control and intra household decision making an experimental study in the philippines i elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the philippines when choices are private men put money into their personal accounts when choices are observable men commit money to consumption for their own benefit when required to communicate men put money into their wives account these strong treatment effects on men but not women appear related more to control than to gender men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treat ment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender specific outcomes

international market integration for natural gas a cointegration analysis of prices in europe north america and japan this paper investigates the degree of integration of natural gas markets in europe north america and japan in the time period between the early 1990s and 2004 the relationship between international gas market prices and their relation to the oil price are explored through principal components analysis and johansen likelihood based cointegration procedure both of them show a high level of natural gas market integration within europe between the european and japanese markets as well as within the north american market at the same time the obtained results suggest that the european respectively japanese and the north american markets were not integrated

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

conditional cash transfers adult work incentives and poverty conditional cash transfer cct programs aim to alleviate poverty through monetary and in kind benefits as well as reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education health and nutrition the success of cct programs at reducing poverty depends on whether and the extent to which cash transfers affect adult work incentives the authors examine whether the progresa program of mexico affects adult participation in the labor market and overall adult leisure time and they link these effects to the impact of the program on poverty using the experimental design of progresa s evaluation sample the authors find that the program does not have any significant effect on adult labor force participation and leisure time their findings on adult work incentives are reinforced further by the result that progresa leads to a substantial reduction in poverty the poverty reduction effects are stronger for the poverty gap and severity of poverty measures

regulation and long term contracting in us natural gas markets this paper addresses the recent experience of the us natural gas industry with contracting and regulation the so called contracts problem between producers and pipelines we develop a simple model of contracting between a single buyer and seller emphasizing the determination of price and minimum purchase take or pay provisions we find that take or pay provisions are likely to emerge in regulated and unregulated markets characterized by uncertainty but that phased deregulation may well exacerbate the problem of contract adjustment our model is supported by empirical evidence drawn from recent samples of contracts between wellhead producers and pipelines

the message in north american energy prices how similar is the price behavior of north american natural gas fuel oil and power prices using current state of the art econometric methodology we explore the degree of shared trends across north american energy markets across these markets there appear to be effective arbitraging mechanisms for the price of natural gas and fuel oil but not for the price of electricity

women s income and boy girl anthropometric status in the cote d ivoire abstract this paper examines the effects of the intrahousehold distribution of income on children s anthropometric status in the c te d ivoire we find that increases in the proportion of cash income accruing to women increases boys height for age relative to girls and that this effect is statistically significant we suggest that this result may reflect efficiency and equity concerns which in this case reinforce each other

gas and lng trading hubs hub indexation and destination flexibility in east asia abstract in the east asian gas markets issues like gas trading hubs hub indexed pricing and destination flexibility are being debated this paper examines the impact of a change in east asia s pricing benchmark and contract flexibility on the regional and global gas markets the paper uses the nexant world gas model a linear program with global cost minimization as the objective to our knowledge this study on hub competition price benchmark change and contract flexibility improvement in east asia will be the first in the literature and have real policy relevance the results show that both price benchmark change and contract flexibility improvements will create an overall benefit for the world and east asia importers but the impacts are different among exporters and importers however there is no evidence of competition among different benchmark hubs and no evidence that destination restrictions cause the asia premium it implies that removal of destination clauses has higher priority than the change to hub indexation for japan korea and chinese taipei but both should be treated equally in china the study also suggests that east asian importers should cooperate among themselves and with exporters to facilitate the hub creation and contract changes in east asia

efficient responses to targeted cash transfers we estimate and test the restrictions of a collective model of household consumption using z conditional demands in the context of a large conditional cash transfer program in rural mexico the model can explain the impacts of the program on the structure of food consumption we use two plausible and novel distribution factors the random allocation of a cash transfer to women and the relative size and wealth of the husband s and wife s family networks our structure does better at predicting the effect of exogenous increases in household income than an alternative unitary structure we cannot reject efficiency of household decisions

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase