In this paper, we use a three-period panel of Tanzanian households to explore the determinants of earnings and earnings growth from 2004 to 2006.  In doing so, we draw particular attention to the role of education and to the importance of heterogeneity between more and less formal...

Reserving in general insurance is often done using chain-ladder-type methods.  We propose a method aimed at situations where there is a sudden change in the economic environment affecting the policies for all accident years in the reserving triangle.  It is shown that methods for forecasting...

This clinical paper analyses a new way of conducting IPOs which has recently been introduced in the U.K.  The essential feature of Accelerated IPOs (aIPOs) is that investors from syndicates to bid for the entire offering, and then execute an immediate IPO (within a week).  Vendors can use an...

We theoretically and empirically examine the relationship between natural resource revenues and financial development.  In the theoretical part, we present a politico-economic model in which contract enforcement is low and decreasing in resource revenues when political institutions are poor,...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks.  However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...

We study price competition between firms over public list or posted prices when a fraction of consumers (termed 'bargainers') can subsequently receive discounts with some probability.  Such stochastic discounts are a feature of markets in which some consumers bargain explicitly; of markets in...

We study the accuracy of a wide variety of estimators of asset price variation constructed from high-frequency data (so-called "realized measures"), and compare them with a simple "realized variance" (RV) estimator.  In total, we consider almost 400 different estimators, applied to 11 years of...

In this paper, we study the impact of labor market restructuring and foreign direct investment on the banking sector, using a dynamic general equilibrium model with a financial sector.  Numerical simulations are performed using stylized Chinese data, and banks failures are generated through...

In the vast majority of low-income countries, financing and political constraints have traditionally impaired the usefulness of fiscal policy as a short-run stabilization device. Indeed, it is widely recognized that fiscal policy in such countries has very often tended to be pro-cyclical. While...

Estimating the covariance and correlation between assets using high frequency data is challenging due to market microstructure effects and Epps effects.  In this paper we extend Xiu's univariate QML approach to the multivariate case, carrying out inference as if the observations arise from an...