More Than a Meal: Pilot Research Study

The national Meals on Wheels network continues to face limited funding, rising costs, unprecedented demand and need and increasing for-profit competition. That is why Meals on Wheels America set out to compare the experience and health outcomes realized by older adults who receive three different levels of service: daily traditional meal delivery, once-weekly frozen delivery and individuals on a waiting list. This study, funded by AARP Foundation and conducted by researchers at Brown University, implemented a groundbreaking approach to investigating the impact of meal service delivery on homebound seniors receiving Meals on Wheels. The study's findings validate what we've all known for decades anecdotally through firsthand experience: that Meals on Wheels does in fact deliver so much more than just a meal

Financially Interlinked Business Groups

Financial interlinkage, in the form of cross-holding of equity and debt between firms, characterize business groups in many countries. We suggest that such financial interlinkage can be viewed as a way to solve credit rationing caused by asymmetric information. If firms possess better information about each other than a bank, then business groups can be a mechanism to induce firms to sort on the basis of this information. Banks can offer a menu of contracts that vary in the extent of financial interlinkage to induce firms to self-select on the basis of the equilibrium composition of the business groups they can form.business groups, cross-holding of debt and equity, financial interlinkage

Diversification, Propping and Monitoring - Business Groups, Firm Performance and the Indian Economic Transition

The industrial landscape of many emerging economies is characterized by diversified business groups. Given the well-known costs of diversification, their prevalence in emerging economies is a puzzle that has not been completely resolved. While there is evidence that business groups in emerging economies confer diversification benefits on group affiliated firms by substituting for missing institutions and markets, whether such benefits persist over the economic transition as institutions and markets develop is unclear. We investigate this issue in the context of the wide-ranging transformation of the Indian economy over the past decade. We find that business group affiliation continues to generate higher market valuation vis--vis standalone firms ten years into the transition, but diversification is not the source of these benefits. Instead, we find that propping through profit transfers among firms within a group and better monitoring through group level directorial interlocks explains the higher market valuation of business group affiliated firms. The effect of propping and directorial interlocks on firm value depends on the equity stakes of the controlling shareholders. Propping appears to be the source of group affiliation benefits in firms with below median cash flow rights of the controlling shareholders, while director interlocks are the primary source of the group effect for firms where the controlling shareholders have above median cash flow rights.business groups, diversification, propping, Monitoring, concentrated ownership

Connected Lending: Thailand before the Financial Crisis

The allocation of credit by banks and financial institutions on 'soft' terms to friends and relatives rather than on the basis of 'hard' market criteria in the years leading up to the East Asian crisis of 1997-98 has been widely noted. Using a detailed dataset on Thai firms prior to the crisis period we examine whether business connections were in fact a good predictor of preferential access to long term bank credit. We find that firms with connections to banks and politicians had greater access to long-term debt than firms without such ties. Connected firms need much less collateral to obtain long term loans than those without connections. Such firms obtain more long term loans, and appear to use less short term loans. We do not find support for the existence of connections between banks and firms serving to reduce asymmetric information problems. Our results thus lend support to the hypothesis that the presence of connections was the most important factor determining access to long term bank debt prior to the financial crisis and are consistent with recent research implicating weak corporate governance in the extent and severity of the crisis.Agency Costs, Capital Structure, Corporate Governance, Crony Capital, Debt Maturity, East Asian Financial Crisis, Thailand

The Shapley-Folkman Theorem and the Range of a Bounded Measure: An Elementary and Unified Treatment

We present proofs, based on the Shapley-Folkman theorem, of the convexity of the range of a strongly continuous, finitely additive measure, as well as that of an atomless, countably additive measure. We also present proofs, based on diagonalization and separation arguments respectively, of the closure of the range of a purely atomic or purely nonatomic countably additive measure. A combination of these results yields Lyapunov's celebrated theorem on the range of a countably additive measure. We also sketch, through a comprehensive bibliography, the pervasive diversity of the applications of the Shapley-Folkman theorem in mathematical economics.

Crony Lending: Thailand before the Financial Crisis

The allocation of credit by banks on 'soft' terms to friends and relatives - often termed cronyism - rather than on the basis of 'hard' market criteria in the years leading up to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 has been hypothesized as an important cause of the crisis. These practices had their basis in the implicit guarantees provided by the government to banks, which in turn percolated down to firms having 'crony' ties to banks as soft-budget constraints for projects of uncertain quality. Such soft-budget constraints should be reflected in preferential access to long term bank credit for firms with close ties to banks. Using pre-crisis data on borrowing patterns in Thailand we find that firms with crony ties to banks and politicians had greater access to long-term debt than firms without such ties. Surprisingly, we find that a broad range of standard firm characteristics suggested as important factors by the literature on firm finance play a much less significant role in explaining the allocation of long term bank credit. Consequently, it is difficult to avoid the interpretation that 'cronyism' was by far the main driver of pre-crisis lending patterns.

I came to look at it as part of a city, rather than part of a museum. It’s a fragment of the urban experience… It’s a space of our time

Ponència presentada a la sessió 11In the contemporary world both museum and city have acquired an increased significance, among other factors, through the competition of cities through culture, and the creation of open environments in response to social change, accelerated mobility and plural identities. This has led to a wide range of possibilities that link the museum and the city, from the museum building as a landmark for the city to the inclusive and participatory practices of contemporary museums. The links are expressed both in theory and in practice. Against this background, the paper proposes to focus on two key issues relating the spatial morphology of the museum to the city: first, how the museum uses urban ideas in its spatial design; and second, how it addresses urban communities through the way it organizes encounters between, on the one hand, objects and information and, on the other, visitors, in its architectural space. A key idea that guides the paper is that the physical encounter with the museum is fundamentally influenced by the relations between spaces and how they organize visitors’ exploration, viewing, and co-­‐awareness and co-­‐presence with others. To analyse the paper’s case studies spatially, we use theoretical and analytical tools offered by space syntax, that allow us to bring to the surface the role of architectural and spatial design in the interaction between museum and city. In the first part of the paper, we will show that, through the idea of axiality and connectivity, the space of the museum is integrated to varying degrees into the contextual street-­‐system and its social spaces can be activated by dense links to the surrounding urban context; while through the concept of informality, generated by the combination of the street-­‐network museum layout and the variety of uses and activities in the museum interior, visitors’ random patterns of exploration can be linked to the way people move in, and occupy, streets, public spaces and parks. The second part of the paper will argue that this circulation flexibility is also related to the principle of inclusiveness in contemporary museums which abandon rigid classificatory schemes to privilege situated meanings, shared experiences, personal perceptions and experiential dissonance. The final part of the paper brings together the findings, constructing a taxonomy of spatial ideas and urban objectives, and proposes an interpretation of the phenomenon of the museum as an urban space in the contemporary city through the concept of urban sociability