Technology, Financial Innovations and Bank Behavior in a Low Income Country

Technology has enabled banks to introduce new products that integrate markets, simplify operations and enable expansion of business at low cost, expand to new markets, take new risks and deepen their markets. Zimbabwe registered significant growth in adoption and diffusion of financial innovations over the past two decades, which coincided with a shift in the structure of credit portfolios of banks, and growth in credit as well as risk appetite. This study empirically evaluates the impact of financial innovations in influencing bank behaviour, specifically, portfolio structure risk appetite and delivery channels of banks in Zimbabwe. The study applied co-relational analysis, Fully Modified OLS and the Dynamic OLS estimation models as well as Autoregressive Granger causality approaches. Empirical results show that technology has the capacity to influence activities of banks in risk management, credit and delivery of banking service in lowincome countries. Precisely, financial innovation influences increase in credit towards previously high-risk areas, compositions of credit portfolios in banks and support growth in number of bank accounts. Causality was found to run from financial innovation to bank behaviour, and only in the long run.&nbsp

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 187

This supplement to Aerospace Medicine and Biology lists 247 reports, articles and other documents announced during November 1978 in Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports (STAR) or in International Aerospace Abstracts (IAA). In its subject coverage, Aerospace Medicine and Biology concentrates on the biological, physiological, psychological, and environmental effects to which man is subjected during and following simulated or actual flight in the earth's atmosphere or in interplanetary space. References describing similar effects of biological organisms of lower order are also included. Emphasis is placed on applied research, but reference to fundamental studies and theoretical principles related to experimental development also qualify for inclusion. Each entry in the bibliography consists of a bibliographic citation accompanied in most cases by an abstract

INFLUENCES OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND FARM CHARACTERISTICS ON FARMERS' RISK ATTITUDES

We have two objectives for this paper. The first is to develop an index reflective of farmers' attitudes towards risk. In addition, we show how the risk indices are distributed by size of farm and other farm and operator characteristics, providing information as to how risk management tools may be used, and farm policies targeted. This information will be useful to help explain agricultural sector structural change, such as complex business arrangements arising in agriculture, and household portfolio investment choices.Farm Management, Labor and Human Capital, Risk and Uncertainty,

Examining Challenges Facing SMEs Businesses in Dar Es Salaam Tanzania: A Case Study of Ilala and Kinondoni Municipalities.

The analysis of different SMEs definitions worldwide reveal that it is very difficult to arrive at a common definition. In fact one study by Auciello (1975) in 75 countries found more than 75 definitions were used in the target countries. This demonstrates very well that there is no common accepted definition of SMEs. SMEs businesses range from very small micro-firms run by one or two persons and very slow growth or no growth to fast growing medium businesses earning millions of dollars and majority employing as many as 250 employees (Fjose et al., 2010). SMEs all over the world and in Tanzania in particular, can be easily established since their requirements in terms of capital; technology, management and even utilities are not as demanding as it is the case for large enterprises. They are regarded as backbone of economic growth in almost all developed and developing countries. In Tanzania, SMEs contribute over 30% of the GDP, and employs 3-4 million people, which is 20-30% of the total labour force (Kazungu, Ndiege and Matolo, 2013). Therefore this paper has identified several challenges facing SMEs such as financial access which is consistently reported as one of the major obstacles to SME’s growth and development where only 20 % of African SMEs have a line of credit from a financial institution. And suggests technical approaches to solving them in respect to the developing economy of Tanzania. Keywords: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Challenges. DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-17-07 Publication date:September 30th 202

Capital constraints and the performance of entrepreneurial firms in Vietnam

Entrepreneurship has been among the key driving forces of the emergence of a dynamic private sector during the recent decades in Vietnam. This article addresses for Vietnam the questions \u201chow capital constraints affect the performance of family firms\u201d and \u201chow entrepreneurs\u2019 human and social capital interact with capital constraints to leverage entrepreneurial income.\u201d A panel of 1721 firms in 4 years is used. Results are consistent with the resource dependency approach, indicating an adverse effect of capital constraints on firm performance: firms suffering capital constraints perform substantially better, suggesting that they need more capital simply to finance newly recognized profit opportunities. Human capital plays a vital role in relaxing capital constraints and improves the entrepreneurial performance, whereas the effect of social capital stemming from strong ties and weak ties is limited: strong ties bring emotional support and weak ties give nonfinancial benefits from regular and useful business contacts. Advanced econometric analysis tools to take into account the endogeneity of capital constraints are used to establish relationships among relevant variables

Essays on Private Equity and Value Creation Levers in European Buyout Transactions

Leveraged buyouts constitute a key pillar of the success private equity funds experience in the domain of alternative investments. This dissertation comprises of three essays, which are based on the empirical analysis of novel data sets. The three essays address the topic of private equity and value creation in European buyouts, which connect to an updated view on the buyout dynamics in the European low interest environment after the global financial crisis of 2008. The first essay (Grobecker and Hartmann-Wendels, 2020, “The Architecture of Success: Value Creation at Transaction Level in European Private Equity Buyouts”) explores the sources of value creation and examines governance, operational and financial effects at transaction level. The second essay (Grobecker and Hartmann-Wendels, 2020, “The Management Narrative in European Private Equity Transactions – an Empirical View on the Accuracy of Buyout Forecasts”) focuses on the accuracy of financial forecasts presented by the target company’s management prior to the buyout and investigates potential drivers of predictive errors. The third essay (Grobecker, 2021, “Negotiation Power of Private Equity Funds – Evidence from Sale and Purchase Agreements in European Buyouts”) analyses the contractual terms governing the buyout acquisition from a risk allocation perspective. Based on a scoring framework, the third essay relates the contractually agreed terms to determinants affecting the negotiation power of private equity funds in buyout settings

Microfinance as Business

We analyze microfinance institutions (MFIs) as businesses, asking how some succeed in covering costs, earning returns, attracting capital, and scaling up. We draw on existing literature and interviews with industry players and academics. Key microfinance business challenges include building volume, keeping loan repayment rates high, retaining customers, and minimizing scope for fraud. Since the 1970s, microfinance innovators have developed clever solutions to these problems. Some have built huge organizations that serve thousands or millions of clients and have demonstrated an impressive capacity for change—in countries, to boot, with weak infrastructure and human capital. The individual innovations have spread both through a Darwinian process of selection and through cultural diffu-sion. We examine three kinds of determinants of commercial success: product design, management, and environmental factors such as regulation. We conclude that much about how microfinance is de-livered can be understood as responses to business imperatives. Indeed, the discoveries of techniques for cost-effective microfinance delivery are the real genius of microfinance, rather than the "discovery" that the poor can repay that dominates its public image. But by Occam's razor (simpler explanations are more plausible), the power of commercial imperatives to explain so many product design choices weakens an alternative explanation for them, namely that they are made primarily to help clients. These doubts point up the need for more rigorous impact evaluations of microfinance.microfinance

The effect of task complexity on rater severity in an adaptive performance-based second language oral communication test

Despite the benefits of performance-based oral communication tests, a plethora of variables, as illustrated in Ockey and Li’s (2015) model of oral communication assessment, can create construct-irrelevant variance in test scores. In relation to human participants in the oral communication tests, previous studies mostly focused on the direct effect of the rater group variable on test scores. Little attention has been paid to the interaction of raters with interviewers in oral communication tests. The present study investigates how raters evaluate test takers’ performance in performance-based oral communication tests when interviewers can adaptively choose their questions, in terms of task complexity, responding to test takers’ performance. An explanatory sequential design with a mixed-methods approach was used to investigate the effect of task complexity on rater severity. For the initial quantitative data analysis, operational rating data from 1,689 test takers whose native languages are not English and scored by 24 certified raters in the Oral English Certification Test (OECT) and 162 audio recordings of 81 international graduate students in the OECT were analyzed with multilevel ordinal logistic regression, a paired samples t-test, and many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM). To further investigate the effect of task complexity on rater severity, nine newly trained raters were trained to judge 80 speech samples of 40 test takers in the OECT. A partial credit model of MFRM was used to analyze raters’ use of the scoring rubric depending on task complexity. In the initial quantitative data analysis, low complexity prompts were statistically estimated as the most difficult item. The results of paired samples t-tests showed that only a few fluency measures demonstrated statistical differences by task complexity. The analysis of the interaction of task complexity with rating contexts with nine newly trained raters using Welch’s t-test showed that the difficulty of high complexity tasks decreased when raters became aware of the task complexity. This change of task difficulty suggests that raters in this adaptive performance-based oral communication may have changed their rating severity depending on their understanding of the task complexity. Follow-up verbal reports and interviews supported the findings in the quantitative analysis

Barriers to Ethnic Minority and Women’s Enterprise:Existing Evidence, Policy Tensions and Unsettled Questions

This article presents an overarching review of the evidence regarding enterprise diversity. It discusses the context of ethnic minorities and women in enterprise and summarises research evidence relating to their relative access to finance, market selection and management skills. Policy within the field of diversity and enterprise is characterised by a number of tensions and unresolved questions including the presence of perceived or actual discrimination, the quantity and quality of ethnic minority and women-led businesses, potential market failure in the support provided to diverse enterprises and the substantive uniqueness of ethnic minority and women-led enterprises. Particular implications for policy and practice as well as directions for future research are discussed