Informal credit markets, interlinkage and migration

This paper develops a model of interlinkage in the credit market and labor market. A credit-cum-labor contract provides the necessary funds to undertake an investment in migration, given the absence of sufficient collateral. The optimal interlinked contract eliminates the scope for strategic default. The result shows that the very presence of inequality is a necessary condition for migration to take place. This could explain the apparent paradox of why poor households in villages where asset distribution is very skewed are more likely to migrate than households in poorer villages with less unequal asset distribution

Should I stay or should I go? Migration under uncertainty: a real options approach

This paper considers migration as an investment decision. It develops a continuoustime stochastic model to explain the optimal timing of migration, in the presence of ongoing uncertainty over wage differentials. The results show that individuals prefer to wait before migrating, even if the present value of the wage differential is positive, because of the uncertainty and the sunk costs associated with migration. An increased degree of risk aversion discourages migration, and interacts with the other variables and parameters affecting migration by exacerbating their effects

Tracing the Impact of Bank Liquidity Shocks: Evidence from an Emerging Market

Do liquidity shocks matter? While even a simple `yes' or `no' presents identification challenges, going beyond this entails tracing how such shocks to lenders are passed on to borrowers, and whether borrowers can in turn cushion these shocks through the credit market. This paper does so by using data that follows all loans made by lenders to borrowing firms in Pakistan, and exploiting cross-bank variation in liquidity shocks induced by the unanticipated nuclear tests in 1998. We isolate the causal impact of the bank lending channel by showing that for the same firm borrowing from two different banks, its loan from the bank experiencing a 1% larger decline in liquidity drops by an additional 0.6%. The liquidity shock also lowers the probability of continued lending to old clients and extending credit to new ones. Although this lending channel affects all firms significantly, large firms and those with strong business and political ties completely compensate the effect by borrowing more from more liquid banks - both through existing and new banking relationships. In contrast, small unconnected firms are entirely unable to hedge and face large drops in overall borrowing and increased financial distress. The liquidity shocks thus have large distributional consequences.

Moral Hazard, Adverse Selection and Health Expenditures: A Semiparametric Analysis

Theoretical models predict asymmetric information in health insurance markets may generate inefficient outcomes due to adverse selection and moral hazard. However, previous empirical research has found it difficult to disentangle adverse selection from moral hazard in health care. We empirically study this question by using data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate a structural model of the demand for health insurance and medical care. Using a two-step semi-parametric estimation strategy we find significant evidence of moral hazard, but not of adverse selection.

Time Preference, Time Discounting, and Smoking Decisions

This study examines the relationship between time discounting, other sources of time preference, and intertemporal choices about smoking. Using a survey fielded for our analysis, we elicit rates of time discount from choices in financial and health domains. We also examine the relationship between other determinants of time preference and smoking status. We find very high rates of time discount in the financial realm for a horizon of one year, irrespective of smoking status. In the health domain, the implied rates of time discount decline with the length of the time delay (hyperbolic discounting) and the sign of the payoff (the "sign effect"). We use a series of questions about the willingness to undergo a colonoscopy to elicit short- and long-run rates of discount in a quasi-hyperbolic discounting framework, finding no evidence that short-run and long-run rates of discount differ by smoking status. Using more general measures of time preference, i.e., impulsivity and length of financial planning horizon, smokers are more impatient. However, neither of these measures is significantly correlated with the measures of time discounting. Our results indicate that subjective rates of time discount revealed through committed choice scenarios are not related to differences in smoking behavior. Rather, a combination of more general measures of time preference and self-control, i.e., impulsivity and financial planning, are more closely related to the smoking decision.

Lack of effect of the human GM-CSF analog E21R on the survival of primary human acute myeloid leukemia cells

The granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) analog E21R binds to the GM-CSF receptor complex with low affinity and acts as a competitive antagonist. In addition, it has been reported to be a potent direct activator of apoptosis in primary human acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cells. We have confirmed the ability of E21R to neutralize the biologic effects of GM-CSF and investigated its activity on primary AML blasts. We find that it failed to induce cell death in blast cells from 23 separate AML cases treated in vitro at concentrations of E21R up to 30 µg/mL. Significant cell death resulted in all cases after incubation with cytosine arabinoside. The lack of effect of E21R on AML blasts was unlikely to be due to an absence of functional GM-CSF receptors because 13 cases demonstrated an increase in cell number with the addition of exogenous GM-CSF. These results do not support the use of E21R for the treatment of AML

The Profitability of Public Enterprises in Pakistan

The importance of the profitability of public enterprise for capital expansion and development has been highlighted in various studies, e.g. in (2], [4] and (5). In Pakistan the increasing role of the public sector in resource mobilization points to the need for analysing public enterprise profitability because of its immense importance for capital financing and growth. This paper analyses the profitability of public enterprises in Pakistan using a Ratio analysis methodology which chooses performance indicators on the basis of their sensitivity to the operational health of the enterprises. The profitability ratios discussed here have been derived from the public-enterprise balance-sheets [9] and constitute the choice-set from which four ratios have been selected on the basis of their predictive power. (See [I], [3], [8] and [10].) In this way, the arbitrariness involved in the choice of the appropriate ratios for analysing enterprise profitability is overcome, even though profitability measurement may still be distorted to such an extent that effective prices diverge from opportunity costs. This makes the task of performance evaluation difficult as such an exercise has to take into account the implications of market distortions. The usefulness of profitability as an indicator of relative inter-firm performance is therefore limited by the fact that prices are administered with reference to products and are not tied to firm experience. But, owing to the lack of data on the required variables, the effect of market distortions on profitability is difficult to analyse

Bank Credit and Business Networks

We construct the topology of business networks across the population of firms in an emerging economy, Pakistan, and estimate the value that membership in large yet diffuse networks brings in terms of access to bank credit and improving financial viability. We link two firms if they have a common director. The resulting topology includes a "giant network" that is order of magnitudes larger than the second largest network. While it displays "small world" properties and comprises 5 percent of all firms, it accesses two-thirds of all bank credit. We estimate the value of joining this giant network by exploiting "incidental" entry and exit of firms over time. Membership increases total external financing by 16.6 percent, reduces the propensity to enter financial distress by 9.5 percent, and better insures firms against industry and location shocks. Firms that join improve financial access by borrowing more from new lenders, particularly those already lending to their (new) giant-network neighbors. Network benefits also depend critically on where a firm connects to in the network and on the firm's pre-existing strength.