Local Financial Development and Household Welfare: Microevidence from Thai Households

We provide new micro evidence on the discussion about the relationship between financial development and welfare. Relying on the concept of local financial development our analysis focuses on three dimensions of household welfare: vulnerability to poverty, investment, and consumption smoothing. Even though we cannot find a significant effect on vulnerability, we provide evidence that financial development is correlated with higher investment and better possibilities to smooth consumption. The extent of both effects is also economically significant. Our results hold for alternative specifications and variations in the measurement of financial development. --credit rationing,investment,consumption,consumption smoothing,growth

Risk attitude and risk behavior: Comparing Thailand and Vietnam

Are responses to a simple survey item sufficiently reliable in eliciting risk attitudes? Our angle in examining reliability is to conduct comparative research across Thailand and Vietnam. We find, first, that the survey item is informative about individual risk attitude because it is plausibly related to socio-demographic characteristics (including vulnerability), it is experimentally validated and has some predictive power. Second, however, we find major differences between both countries: whereas explained variances of regressions are tentatively higher in Vietnam, the predictive value of the survey item is much lower than in Thailand. Therefore, the survey item cannot be implemented across countries in an unreflected way. --risk attitude,socio-economic survey,household behavior,field experiment

Essays on the economics of foreign exchange and development finance

[no abstract

Die griechisch-europäische Krise: Ungleichgewichte, Finanzmärkte und die Stabilität des Euroraums.

The external imbalances in Europe have led the Europzone into a crisis. Out of three goals in international monetary policy, only two can be realized at the same time. By joining a monetary union a country has implicitly decided about these two goals. In order to stay competitive, wages and prices have to adjust to the targeted inflation rate of the common currency. This failed largely in Greek and other Southern-European countries. Thus, ending the Greek-European crisis requires a solution for this structural problem. According to the monetary union's present arrangements, full adjustment has to be taken by the Southern-European memeber states

Die griechisch-europäische Krise: Ungleichgewichte, Finanzmärkte und die Stabilität des Euroraums.

The external imbalances in Europe have led the Europzone into a crisis. Out of three goals in international monetary policy, only two can be realized at the same time. By joining a monetary union a country has implicitly decided about these two goals. In order to stay competitive, wages and prices have to adjust to the targeted inflation rate of the common currency. This failed largely in Greek and other Southern-European countries. Thus, ending the Greek-European crisis requires a solution for this structural problem. According to the monetary union's present arrangements, full adjustment has to be taken by the Southern-European memeber states

Interorganizational relationships and hospital financial performance: a resource-based perspective

This study follows a resource-based theory perspective and aims to analyze the interorganizational relationships between hospitals and outpatient physicians, and hospital financial performance. In the light of increasing interdependence among healthcare providers which has made the coordination of service provision more complex, such relationships could be considered a resource for hospitals that lead to higher performance. In this study, the results from a survey of medical directors were combined with financial performance indicators of their hospitals. The results show that having effective interorganizational relationships is positively associated with the hospital's profitability. This finding emphasizes the importance of an investment in interorganizational relationships from the hospital's point of view