Microfinance provides saving and lending services to the poor. It is not conceptually different from banking in the USA. People are able to save money at and borrow money from microfinance institutions. They are compensated for saving and charged for borrowing by an interest rate that compounds...

There is growing concern, particularly in policy circles, that rural manufacturing plants may be less likely to export than metro area plants, and that this may exacerbate the economic difficulties of rural America. A variety of reasons have been offered to expect this export gap, but little...

This paper compares some specifications for estimating current sub-state (county or MSA) income. A large number of trials are generated, using the data for Tennessee, in a procedure akin to a series of Monte-Carlo experiments. The out-of-sample forecast errors are examined to see which...

Since the days of Walter Bagehot, a number of economists have described how financial development facilitates economic growth. An extensive empirical literature has subsequently established that the relationship between financial development and economic growth is conditioned by the cultural and...

An important area of consumer choice is time allocation and its role in dictating behavior. For the typical student worker, the time allocation decision involves three primary activities: paid employment, academic pursuits, and leisure pursuits. Exogenous factors such as the wage rate, price of...

Previous research on intergenerational mobility in income, occupation, or social class as a Markov process typically uses regression models to analyze cross-sectional data. In this paper we draw data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to build Markov transition states,...