Distinguishing Constraints on Financial Inclusion and Their Impact on GDP, TFP, and the Distribution of Income.

A general equilibrium model featuring multiple realistic sources of financial frictions is developed to study how different constraints interact in equilibrium. We highlight, distinguish, and evaluate their differential impacts and rich interactions. The economic impact of financial inclusion policies in an economy depends not only on which constraint is alleviated, but also on the tightness of other constraints.

FAMILY FIRMS, BANK RELATIONSHIPS, AND FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS: A COMPREHENSIVE SCORE CARD.

We examine the effect of financial constraints on firm investment and cash flow. We combine data from the Spanish Mercantile Registry and the Bank of Spain Credit Registry to classify firms according to whether they are family-owned, not family-owned, or belong to a family-linked network of firms and according to their number of banking relations (with none, one, or several banks). Our empirical strategy is structural, based on a dynamic model solved numerically to generate the joint distribution of firm capital (size), investment and cash flow, both in cross-sections and in panel data.

Risk and Return in Village Economies.

This paper provides a theory-based empirical framework for understanding the risk and return on productive capital assets and their allocation across activities in an economy characterized by idiosyncratic and aggregate risk and thin formal markets for real and financial assets. We apply our framework to households running business enterprises in Thai villages with extensive networks, taking advantage of panel data: income, assets, consumption, gifts, and loans. We decompose risk and estimate the risk premia faced by households, distinguishing aggregate risk from idiosyncratic, potentially diversifiable risk.

Integrated Household Surveys: An Assessment of U.S. Methods and an Innovation.

We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts-balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows-are used to assess the degree of integration in leading U.S.

Economic development, flow of funds, and the equilibrium interaction of financial frictions.

We use a variety of different datasets from Thailand to study not only the extremes of micro and macro variables but also within-country flow of funds and labor migration. We develop a general equilibrium model that encompasses regional variation in the type of financial friction and calibrate it to measured variation in regional aggregates. The model predicts substantial capital and labor flows from rural to urban areas even though these differ only in the underlying financial regime.

Human Capital Acquisition and Occupational Choice: Implications for Economic Development.

Using household-level data from Mexico we document patterns among schooling, entrepreneurial decisions and household characteristics such as assets, talent of household members and age of the household head. Motivated by our findings, we develop a heterogeneous-agent, incomplete-markets, overlapping-generations dynasty model. Households jointly decide over their life cycle on kids' human capital investments (schooling) and parents' entry, exit and investment into alternative entrepreneurial modes (subsistence and modern).

An Evaluation of Financial Institutions: Impact on Consumption and Investment Using Panel Data and the Theory of Risk-Bearing.

The theory of the optimal allocation of risk and the Townsend Thai panel data on financial transactions are used to assess the impact of the major formal and informal financial institutions of an emerging market economy. We link financial institution assessment to the actual impact on clients, rather than ratios and non-performing loans. We derive both consumption and investment equations from a common core theory with both risk and productive activities.

Modular analysis of peripheral blood gene expression in rheumatoid arthritis captures reproducible gene expression changes in tumor necrosis factor responders.

Objective: To establish whether the analysis of whole-blood gene expression is useful in predicting or monitoring response to anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) therapy in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Methods: Whole-blood RNA (using a PAXgene system to stabilize whole-blood RNA in the collection tube) was obtained at baseline and at 14 weeks from 3 independent cohorts, consisting of a combined total of 240 RA patients who were beginning therapy with anti-TNF. We used an approach to gene expression analysis that is based on modular patterns of gene expression, or modules.

Dynamic Financial Constraints: Distinguishing Mechanism Design from Exogenously Incomplete Regimes.

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop computational methods based on mechanism design, linear programming, and maximum likelihood to estimate, compare, and statistically test these alternative dynamic models with financial/information constraints.

Heterogeneity and Risk Sharing in Village Economies.

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households' risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is substantial, statistically significant heterogeneity in estimated risk preferences.

The Great Equalizer: Health Care Access and Infant Mortality in Thailand.

This paper analyzes Thailand's 2001 healthcare reform, "30 Baht". The program increased funding available to hospitals to care for the poor and reduced copays to 30 Baht (~$0.75).

The Impact of Credit on Village Economies.

This paper evaluates the short-term impact of Thailand's 'Million Baht Village Fund'program, among the largest scale government microfinance iniative in the world, using pre- and post-program panel data and quasi-experimental cross-village variation in credit-per-household. We find that the village funds have increased total short-term credit, consumption, agricultural investment, income growth (from business and labor), but decreased overall asset growth. We also find a positive impact on wages, an important general equilibrium effect.

Measuring the Return on Household Enterprise: What Matters Most for Whom?

Return on assets (ROA) from household enterprise is crucial for understanding the well-being and productivity of households in developing economies. Yet the definition and measurement of household enterprise ROA remain inconsistent or unclear. We illustrate potential measurement problems with examples from various actual surveys.

A Structural Evaluation of a Large-Scale Quasi-Experimental Microfinance Initiative.

This paper uses a structural model to understand, predict, and evaluate the impact of an exogenous microcredit intervention program, the Thai Million Baht Village Fund program. We model household decisions in the face of borrowing constraints, income uncertainty, and high-yield indivisible investment opportunities. After estimation of parameters using pre-program data, we evaluate the model's ability to predict and interpret the impact of the village fund intervention.

Information-Constrained Optima with Retrading: An Externality and Its Market-Based Solution.

This paper studies the efficiency of competitive equilibria in environments with a moral hazard problem and unobserved states, both with retrading in ex post spot markets. The interaction between private information problems and the possibility of retrade creates an externality, unless preferences have special, restrictive properties. The externality is internalized by allowing agents to contract ex ante on market fundamentals determining the spot price or interest rate, over and above contracting on actions and outputs.

Wealth Accumulation and Factors Accounting for Success.

We use detailed income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements constructed for households in a long monthly panel in an emerging market economy, and some recent contributions in economic theory, to document and better understand the factors underlying success in achieving upward mobility in the distribution of net worth. Wealth inequality is decreasing over time, and many households work their way out of poverty and lower wealth over the seven year period. The accounts establish that, mechanically, this is largely due to savings rather than incoming gifts and remittances.

The Geographic Concentration of Enterprise in Developing Countries.

A nation's economic geography can have an enormous impact on its development. In Thailand, we show that a high concentration of enterprise in an area predicts high subsequent growth in and around that area. We also find spatially contiguous convergence of enterprise with stagnant areas left behind.

Welfare Gains from Financial Liberalization.

Financial liberalization has been a controversial issue, as empirical evidence for growth enhancing effects is mixed. Here, we find sizable welfare gains from liberalization (cost to repression), though the gain in economic growth is ambiguous. We take the view that financial liberalization is a government policy that alters the path of financial deepening, while financial deepening is endogenously chosen by agents given a policy and occurs in transition towards a distant steady state.

Measuring the Impact of Financial Intermediation: Linking Contract Theory to Econometric Policy Evaluation.

We study the impact that financial intermediation can have on productivity through the alleviation of credit constraints in occupation choice and/or an improved allocation of risk, using both static and dynamic structural models as well as reduced form OLS and IV regressions. Our goal in this paper is to bring these two strands of the literature together. Even though, under certain assumptions, IV regressions can recover accurately the true model-generated local average treatment effect, these are quantitatively different, in order of magnitude and even sign, from other policy impact parameters (e.

Endogenous Groups and Dynamic Selection in Mechanism Design.

We create a dynamic theory of endogenous risk sharing groups, with good internal information, and their coexistence with relative performance, individualistic regimes, which are informationally more opaque. Inequality and organizational form are determined simultaneously. Numerical techniques and succinct re-formulations of mechanism design problems with suitable choice of promised utilities allow the computation of a stochastic steady state and its transitions.

Discovery and development of 5-[(5S,9R)-9-(4-cyanophenyl)-3-(3,5-dichlorophenyl)-1-methyl-2,4-dioxo-1,3,7-triazaspiro[4.4]non-7-yl-methyl]-3-thiophenecarboxylic acid (BMS-587101)--a small molecule antagonist of leukocyte function associated antigen-1.

LFA-1 (leukocyte function-associated antigen-1), is a member of the beta2-integrin family and is expressed on all leukocytes. This letter describes the discovery and preliminary SAR of spirocyclic hydantoin based LFA-1 antagonists that culminated in the identification of analog 8 as a clinical candidate. We also report the first example of the efficacy of a small molecule LFA-1 antagonist in combination with CTLA-4Ig in an animal model of transplant rejection.

Sampling design for an integrated socioeconomic and ecological survey by using satellite remote sensing and ordination.

Environmental variability is an important risk factor in rural agricultural communities. Testing models requires empirical sampling that generates data that are representative in both economic and ecological domains. Detrended correspondence analysis of satellite remote sensing data were used to design an effective low-cost sampling protocol for a field study to create an integrated socioeconomic and ecological database when no prior information on ecology of the survey area existed.