Working Paper
The effects of land titling in Tanzania
We use household survey data to investigate the effects of formal, private property rights to agricultural land on agricultural investment, land valuation and access to credit in Tanzania. Results show that while there are no detectable effects of...
Journal Article
The economics of counterinsurgency
Present in India since the 1960s, the Naxalite insurgency has steadily spread across the country. Counterinsurgency measures lagged behind and did not follow any systematic process till the early 2000s with the exception of Andhra Pradesh, which in...
Journal Article
The Forgotten Property Rights
Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both...
Working Paper
Economic and non-economic returns to Communist Party membership in Vietnam
Single-party political systems exist in a number of countries, such as China and Vietnam. In these countries, party membership is potentially an important source of economic and social status. This paper investigates these effects and the mechanisms...
Working Paper
State-dependent fiscal multipliers and financial dynamics
The aim of this paper is to assess South Africa’s fiscal multiplier across different states of the economy, with a focus on the financial accelerator mechanism of fiscal policy shocks, by estimating impulse response functions from both linear and non...
Blog
Job Creation and the Business Cycle in Brazil
by
Túlio Cravo
March 2015
What type of business destroys proportionately more jobs during times of economic recessions and hires more in booms? This simple question motivates...
Working Paper
Foreign Banks and Credit Volatility
Foreign bank presence has substantially increased in Latin America during the second half of the 1990s, which has prompted an intense debate on its banking and macroeconomic consequences. In this paper, we apply ARCH techniques to jointly estimate...
Working Paper
Political Connections and Investment in Rural Vietnam
This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers’ agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly...
Working Paper
Vulnerability, Trust and Microcredit
This paper investigates the economic conditions of rural households in China. Historical survey data indicate that over 80 per cent of rural households earn less than 4,500 yuan in net disposable income each year, that for the vast majority of rural...
Working Paper
Household Financial Assets in the Process of Development
Systematic information on household financial asset holdings in developing countries is very sparse; we review some available data and current policy debates. Although financial asset holdings by households are highly concentrated, deeper financial...
Working Paper
Excess Credit and the South Korean Crisis
We provide a novel empirical analysis of the South Korean credit market that reveals large volumes of excess credit since the late 1970s, indicating that a sizeable proportion of total credit was being used to refinance unprofitable projects. Our...
Working Paper
Insolvency and Debt Recovery Procedures in Economic Development
Insolvency and debt recovery procedures are as crucial to a well-performing financial sector as credit provision itself. They are even more important in Africa, where attempts are underway to create fully-fledged financial markets. For the financial...
Working Paper
Finance and Growth
This study is an attempt towards an integration of financial development and its effect on the real sector via the transmission mechanism with special reference to developing and emerging market economies. It finds two cointegrating relations between...
Working Paper
Loan Processing Costs and Information Asymmetries-Implications for Financial Sector Development and Economic Growth
The paper presents a model in which credit-constrained firms might delay the adoption of new and more productive technologies because of the very high external financing costs they face. Our point of departure is that the efficiency of the banking...
Working Paper
Incorporating Insurance Provisions in Microfinance Contracts
We examine a simple extension to existing credit contacts for the poor (‘microfinance contracts’), that would allow financial institutions to provide repayment insurance to their clients. The proposed contract uses the repeated nature of loans to...