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Different forms of social learning have been explored to act as complements to conventional extension services. This paper examines the possibility of using vocational training to high school students who in turn transfer information to their parents. We conduct a randomized control trial in nine communities in rural Nicaragua and evaluate changes in the knowledge of agricultural technologies, access to credit markets, and technology adoption for parents and students using a difference-in-difference approach. Our results show improvements in knowledge-based outcomes for students and parents, and increased access to credit markets and adoption of agricultural technologies by parents. Given the increase in schooling across developing countries, our results suggest that programs designed around within-family information diffusion can complement more conventional forms of agricultural extension. Little explored channels of information exchange can act as complements or substitutes of conventional extension models, where those are weak or non-existent. This paper is one of the first to explore and evaluate the teacher-student-parent of information exchange as an alternative for agricultural technology diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the political economy literature exploring the intersection of the welfare state and financialisation by addressing two important questions that have emerged from recent findings. First, why have both low generosity and high generosity environments been linked to higher levels of household debt? Second, how might this be explained by the variation in the role of debt across these very different contexts? To answer these questions, I develop a typology of Welfare State – Credit Contexts, which emerges from the interaction of two dimensions: welfare generosity and credit access. I test the implications of this model using welfare generosity and household liabilities data for a sample of OECD countries, spanning from the late 1990s to 2010. Using fixed effects models, I find that welfare generosity is negatively related to non-mortgage debt, with evidence that this relationship is conditional on credit access. In contrast, I find mortgage debt is consistently linked to levels of credit accessibility but fail to establish its relationship to welfare generosity. These results demonstrate the need for greater specificity when discussing the relationship between welfare generosity and household debt and for greater attention to the causes and consequences of different types of household debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on accounting-based prediction models of CDS spreads for a sample of 292 firms in 16 countries. In our examination, we estimate the models for both financial and nonfinancial firms before and after mandatory IFRS adoption. We find that mean and median absolute percentage prediction errors are larger for both financial and non-financial firms after mandatory IFRS adoption. We also estimate accounting-based prediction models of CDS spreads separately for financial and non-financial US firms as a benchmark. Although US firms also show an increase in the mean and median absolute percentages of prediction errors over the same period, our findings from regressions that use a difference-in-difference design indicate that the increase is significantly greater for firms in countries that adopted IFRS mandatorily. We also find that in the post-adoption period, prediction errors are larger for firms in countries with weaker institutions such as low levels of property rights and more restrictive access to credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates intranational risk-sharing behaviour in Korea's 16 province-level regions over the period 2001–2017. Korea's degree of intranational risk-sharing is at an almost perfect level. However, the extent of risk-sharing declines in the period following the subprime crisis. We also find that risk-sharing through the factor markets works well for metropolitan cities while the degree of risk-sharing is much higher for provinces through the fiscal channel and the credit markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a simple economic model to study important issues in debates about distributive justice. What role do non-labor productive assets play? What role does private ownership play? What role does scarcity play? What role do credit and labor markets play? The model is used to address these questions, and in the process explain why even if those who acquire scarce productive assets do so fairly, and in a manner that deserves compensation, there is reason to believe (1) that when people own productive assets privately outcomes will become unfair, and (2) credit and labor markets will aggravate inequities. The article concludes that distributive justice requires compensation commensurate with the economic sacrifices people make and acknowledges important challenges that must be overcome to achieve this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify the network structure of spillovers and time-varying spillover intensities across European sovereign credit markets proposing a novel Copula-Granger causality based structural vector auto-regressive (SVAR) approach. Via the proposed framework, we examine the topological and time-varying spillover and contagion between 13 European credit markets, which is found to be consistent with crisis events. The heterogeneity in directional impacts could be useful in revealing contagion effects across the credit markets. We also find that newly proposed surprise and uncertainty indexes, among other macro-economic variables, significantly explain the spillover dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms, especially in their banking sectors, that are critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking reforms were implemented during the 1990s. Using the argument that well-functioning credit markets would reflect a credit channel for monetary policy at work, we test whether a change in monetary policy has a predictable impact on borrowing behaviour of several types of firms, including business group affiliated, unaffiliated private firms, state-owned firms and foreign firms. The empirical results suggest that unaffiliated private firms have the most vulnerable to monetary policy stance during tight policy regimes. We also find that during tight monetary policy regimes, bank credit of smaller firms is more sensitive to changes in the interest rate than that of large firms. In an easy money regime, monetary policy and the associated change in interest rate does not affect change in bank credit, change in total debt and the proportion of bank credit in total debt for any of the firms. We discuss the policy implications of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that fiscal multiplier estimations may be biased by movements in asset and credit markets, as they facilitate spurious correlations of changes in cyclically adjusted revenues and spending with output growth via an identification bias and an omitted variable bias, thus overstating episodes of expansionary consolidations and downplaying contractionary consolidations. When controlling for asset and credit market movements in otherwise standard approaches to identification, we find multipliers to increase on average by 0.3-1 units. Fiscal consolidations are thus more likely to be contractionary and more harmful to growth than expected by some strands of the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article estimates the amount of moral hazard effect in sub-national credit markets. I employ the case of Mexico because of the country's lack of political accountability; a fact that I argue allows for observation of this informational problem. In particular, out of every dollar borrowed, sub-national governments spend 45 cents in activities unrelated to the purpose of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common critique of the Federal Reserve over the past crisis is that it should have better anticipated the impact of the run-up in home mortgage debt and the subsequent housing market crash on the financial system. As a result, the Federal Reserve should have moved much more quickly to shore up financial markets. Our article tests the hypothesis that the impact of the housing market crash on the financial system could have been anticipated. Using a VAR model along with impulse response functions and variance decompositions, we examine the link between housing market mortgage debt shocks and the financial intermediaries’ credit market behaviour. We find important connections between key macroeconomic variables and the credit behaviour of these financial institutions. However, using the pre-crisis data, we find that housing market debt shocks fail to have an impact on the credit markets accessed by these firms. These results support the notion that the impact of this crisis on the financial system could not have been anticipated given the information available at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

True cures in health care are rare but likely not for long. The high price tag that accompanies a cure along with its rapid uptake create challenges in the financing of cures by public and private payers. In the US, the disaggregated nature of health insurance system adds to this challenge as patients frequently churn across multiple health plans. This creates a 'free-rider' problem, where no one health plan has the incentive to invest in cure since the returns will be scattered over many health plans. Here, a new health currency is proposed as a generalized version of a social impact bond that has the potential to solve this free-rider problem, as it can be traded not only between public and private payers but also within the private sector. An ensuing debate as to whether and how to develop such a currency can serve the US health care system well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant boom occurred in the Indian financial market and growth in the post-liberalization era. This motivates us to analyze the impact of stock market and credit market (two components of financial market) for the growth of financial market. This paper attempts to show the linkage between stock and credit markets and their impact on the Indian economy taking the period after post-liberalization. The period of analysis is from 1994 to 2010; we identify the three variables as stationary and find a relationship between the financial market and gross domestic product (GDP) and a long-run effect of lagged differences in credit market on GDP. It has been inferred that stock market development has larger and more significant long-run mutual effects on economic growth than credit market development in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Despite a huge theoretical literature on credit markets charaterized by asymmetric information little is known about the structure of real world credit contracts or the nature of the underlying informational regime on which they are predicated. A model is constructed and tested that enables delineation of credit contract features and establishment of the nature of the underlying informational regime. Large sample estimates based on individual loans from a major UK bank are shown to support both the symmetric and asymmetric information variants of the model: better borrowers get larger loans and lower interest rates; collateral provision and loan size reduce the interest rate paid. However, consistent with a regime of symmetric information collateral levels are found to be independent of borrower type. Finally, in line with the insurance literature, the bank is shown to use qualitative as well as quantitative information in the structuring of loan contracts to small businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]