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...

In village economies, insurance networks are key to smoothing shocks, while production networks can propagate them. The interplay of these networks is crucial. We show that a significant health expenditure shock to one household propagates to other linked households via supply-chain and labor...

We measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model and complement the results with a measure based on optimal portfolio choice. Among households with relatives living in the same village, full insurance cannot be rejected, suggesting that...

We look at liquidity constraints and the financing of household investment in fixed assets. We find that rural households in our sample, especially the poor, seem to face liquidity constraints. The constraints are partially mitigated by kinship networks in the village. When we further analyze...

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...

This paper uses loan-level data from Thailand's National Credit Bureau to study household debt over the life cycle of borrowers. We decompose two aggregate and commonly used measures of debt — debt per capita and delinquency rate — into components that unveil the extensive and intensive...

A large fraction of business groups around the world are run by families. In this paper, we analyze how the structure of the families behind these business groups affects the groups' organization, governance and performance. To address this question, we constructed a unique data set of the...

This study looks at capitalism in Southeast Asia through the lenses of modern corporate finance, based on contract and ownership theories of the firm. The paper limits its survey to recent literature that uses firm-level micro data of Southeast Asia corporate firms. Three major common issues of...

This paper extends a structural model of investment with costly external finance to firms in business groups, derives an empirical regression counterpart, and uses it to test for the existence of internal capital markets in business groups and various characteristics of a group that tend to...