Functional Outcome in Bipolar Disorder: The Big Picture

Previous research on functional outcome in bipolar disorder (BD) has uncovered various factors that exacerbate psychosocial disability over the course of illness, including genetics, illness severity, stress, anxiety, and cognitive impairment. This paper presents an integrated view of these findings that accounts for the precipitous decline in psychosocial functioning after illness onset. The proposed model highlights a number of reciprocal pathways among previously studied factors that trap people in a powerful cycle of ailing forces. The paper discusses implications to patient care as well as the larger social changes required for shifting the functional trajectory of people with BD from psychosocial decline to growth

Effects of insider trading under different market structures

In this paper, we study the relationship between the market structure in the real sector and the effects of insider trading. We find that the market structure in the real sector matters. When the monopolist insider chooses the price of the real good rather than the output, insider trading increases the price rather than the quantity. When the insider competes with another firm in the real sector, and chooses quantity, the output increases due to insider trading but by less than in monopoly models. In addition, the stock price is more informative than in monopoly models

SME's lending and Islamic finance. Is it a “win–win” situation?

Information asymmetry is a common feature that hinders lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In the last decade, the growth in Islamic banks lending to SMEs was overwhelming to the extent that it prompted practitioners to regard this as a “win–win” situation. Unlike a conventional bank that mainly resorts to relationship banking to SMEs, an Islamic bank uses a Murabaha contract that creates a “collateral-by-contract” to the borrower. Such distinct lending approaches by the two types of banks have an implication on banks' cost curves that arise from differences in monitoring cost. In this article, we develop a two-stage competition model to investigate the growth in SMEs lending by Islamic banks. In our theoretical model Islamic and conventional banks compete with prices at the first stage (Bertrand framework) and with loan output at the second stage (Cournot framework). Our results reveal that in price competition an Islamic bank will gain market share initially due to its differentiated product. However, in the second stage, the amount of lending to SMEs by Islamic banks decreases due to market share competition

The Effect of Bank Competition on the Bank's Incentive to Collateralize

It has been argued that competing banks make inefficiently frequent use of collateralization in situations where they are better able to evaluate a project's risk than entrepreneurs. We study the bank's choice between screening and collateralization in a model where banks do not have this superior screening skill. In particular, we study the effect of bank competition on this choice. We find that competing banks use collateral less often than a monopolistic bank because competition will intensify if both banks collateralize. Moreover, bank competition is welfare improving if collateralization is rather costly

Competition and financial constraints: a two-sided story

This paper examines the relation between competitive pressure and financial constraints using firm-level survey data from 27 emerging economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the years 2005 and 2009. In the empirical analysis, we disentangle the impact of product market competition on the demand and supply of credit. Our results support the hypothesis that competitive pressure on borrowers affects both sides of the credit market. We find that in industries with greater competitive pressure firms’ demand for credit is typically higher but a greater proportion of firms are discouraged from loan application due to greater cost of credit. Interestingly, we find the detrimental effect of competitive pressure on credit access breaks down when firms are audited, when they can pledge collateral and when they engage in export activities. These results point to the role of competitive pressure in the lenders’ information set when limited information is availabl