This paper utilizes a unique dataset of 500 firms in ten Cambodian provinces and a natural experiment to test a long-held convention in political economy that the predictability of a corruption is at least as important for firm investment decisions as the amount of bribes a firm must pay,...

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...

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...

Some gasoline markets exhibit remarkable price cycles, where price spikes are followed by a string of small price declines until the next price spike. This pattern is predicted from a model of competition driven by Edgeworth cycles, as described by Maskin and Tirole. We extend the Maskin and...

There are surprisingly few estimates of the effect of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. Further, along both sides of a state border, a change in one state's sales tax can shed light on the nature of competition, as a subset of firms effectively experiences a change in...

This chapter discusses natural disasters and their impacts on economic development of Southeast Asia. Natural disasters generally lead to capital decumulation, have impacts on total factor productivity, and involve vulnerability of people living in the economy. Their effects could persist in the...

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...

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...

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is built on a fundamentally different paradigm: rather than having to trust individuals and institutions, participants in DeFi potentially only have to trust computer code that is enforced by a decentralized network of computers. We examine a natural experiment that...