This paper develops an asymmetric information model that provides an economic rational for co-signing. It is shown that banks can solve adverse selection problems by offering a co-signing contract that induces a risky and a safe firm to group together. The equilibrium co-signing debt contract strictly Pareto dominates an equilibrium without a co-signer if the latter entails rationing. The debt ...

There has long been a minority view that providing people with cash is an effective way of combating poverty and economic insecurity while promoting livelihoods and work. The mainstream view has been that giving people money, without conditions or obligations, promotes idleness and dependency, while being unnecessarily costly. Better, they contend, would be to allocate the available money to sc...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentive compatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The survey measure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentally derived risk attitude. This holds when we add various socio-demographic control variables to the survey-experiment-relation which are ...

This paper explores heterogeneity in the openness-productivity growth relationship, specifically whether the productivity payoffs from openness or trade liberalisation are conditioned by the quality of a country’s institutions and the extent of natural barriers. The paper endogenously searches for the type of heterogeneity; what variable might be used to capture the heterogeneity and with what ...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that many institutional changes can be understood astransitions occurring at roughly the same level (zone) of development. The Primacy ofInstitutions (PoI) view claims that economic development is a consequence of an exogenousselection of institutions. Our survey of the empirical evidence and our own estimates revealthat it is easy to fi...

Path dependence in occupations refers to the observed occupational distribution in a population or in a sub-population at a point in time that depends on changes that occurred years or centuries earlier. Path dependence in occupations can be the outcome of the cumulative concentration of certain productive activities in specific regions over time, it can emerge through the effect of parental in...

The issue of poverty traps is assessed using quantile regression. For that an augmentation of the usual convergence regressions by quadratic and cubic terms is used with emphasis on curve fitting rather than parameter estimation. The results show that the generic mechanism leading to poverty traps predominantly applies to countries with relatively low levels of income per capita or per worker t...

although extensive experimental work has been carried out during the last several years, experimental reaction rate constants are available only for hundreds of compounds. therefore, it is useful to develop a theoretical prediction method, which can be used to obtain estimates of the necessary kinetic parameters. one of the most successful approaches to predict chemical properties starting only...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and that this indirect effect on incumbent employment leads to more jobs than what is created by the new...

Ž . The paper uses new cross-country data on income and asset land distribution to show Ž . that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset Ž . distribution and long-term growth; ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but Ž . not for the rich; and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the Kuznets hypothesis. Policies that in...