This paper examines the role of collateral in the rural credit market of an emerging country. Due to opaque information and weak enforcement, the need for collateral is expected to be high. However, rural households usually lack adequate assets to pledge as collateral. How is this puzzle solved?...

This paper examines the contribution of recently introduced village funds in rural Thailand, one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented. We use a cross-sectional approach examining village funds in relation to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that village funds...

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....

This paper examines the nature of risk faced by households in Thailand and the strategies that these households adopt to mitigate the adverse effect from income shortfalls. I use a new cross-section dataset that is based on a sample of both urban and rural households. I find that price shock is...

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....

We show that technical indicators deliver economic value in predicting the U.S. equity premium. A crucial element of this value stems from the stability of return predictability over the full sample period from 1950 to 2013. Results tentatively improve over time and beat alternatives over...

Early warning systems (EWSs) are subject to restrictions that apply to exchange rates in general: fundamentals matter but their influence is small and unstable. Keeping this in mind, five lessons emerge : First, EWSs have robust forecasting power and thus help policy-makers to prevent crises....

The paper estimates and compares cost efficiency of domestic and foreign banks in Thailand by using bank-panel data between 1995 and 2003. It also examines the effect of foreign bank entry on banking efficiency in Thailand since the significant acquisitions by foreign banks after the 1997...

The ex ante theory of collateral states that better informed lenders, such as informal lenders, rely less on collateral. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and informal lenders in the same market. Indeed, formal lenders rely more often on collateral, controlling for...

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...