To develop realistic, but useful general equilibrium models which can be applied to villages, regions, and the national economies in which some people remain relatively poor and exposed to high risk. The models must incorporate this risk. Some of these models must capture apparently limited access to quasi formal and formal markets and institutions for credit and insurance. Some of these models will be explicit about impediments to trade such as private information and incentive problems. The role of the nuclear family, extended household, and larger networks of friends and relatives will be understood and evaluated in this context. 2. To derive from these various models implication outcomes: the final distribution of resources--consumption, labor supply, production and investment--and for institutions. 3. To design and administer a household and community level survey in Thailand consistent with measuring those outcomes and mechanisms predicted by the particular models and actual outcomes and mechanisms, generally. Field research, villages stays, and anthropological methods will be used when feasible, trying to strike a balance between reliability of household response and sample size. 4. To work with the Credit Union League of Thailand (CULT), the Association of Production Credit Groups (PCGs), and the Community Development Department (CDD) in an evaluation of village level organization such as rice banks, local saving-investment funds, and health care funds, and to work with the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) in an evaluation access and use of the national level systems of credit and insurance in particular. 5. To test in particular, to see if extended families and networks of friends and relatives and/or local lenders provide reasonably good systems of credit and insurance for their members and clients within and across villages and to quantify the role the family is playing. To test if local, village level institutions replace or supplement informal systems of credit and insurance, and to see if there are villages which would benefit from expansions of rice banks, credit unions, production credit institutions, or health care funds. To test to see if formal sector lenders such as the BAAC provide reasonably good systems of credit and insurance with and across villages and regions, and again, to see if the system might be expanded with a net benefit. To see if BAAC impact is related to the use of small, joint liability borrowing groups, and to understand if any apparent benefits are due to indirect use family networks or village level institutions.
| Moll, Benjamin; Townsend, Robert M; Zhorin, Victor (2017) Economic development, flow of funds, and the equilibrium interaction of financial frictions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 114:6176-6184 |
| Karaivanov, Alexander; Townsend, Robert M (2014) Dynamic Financial Constraints: Distinguishing Mechanism Design from Exogenously Incomplete Regimes. Econometrica 82:887-959 |
| Gruber, Jonathan; Hendren, Nathaniel; Townsend, Robert M (2014) The Great Equalizer: Health Care Access and Infant Mortality in Thailand. Am Econ J Appl Econ 6:91-107 |
| Alem, Mauro; Townsend, Robert M (2014) An Evaluation of Financial Institutions: Impact on Consumption and Investment Using Panel Data and the Theory of Risk-Bearing. J Econom 183:91-103 |
| Chiappori, Pierre-André; Samphantharak, Krislert; Schulhofer-Wohl, Sam et al. (2014) Heterogeneity and Risk Sharing in Village Economies. Quant Econom 5:1-27 |
| Cole, Shawn; Giné, Xavier; Tobacman, Jeremy et al. (2013) Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India. Am Econ J Appl Econ 5:104-135 |
| Samphantharak, Krislert; Townsend, Robert M (2012) Measuring the Return on Household Enterprise: What Matters Most for Whom? J Dev Econ 98:58-70 |
| Kaboski, Joseph P; Townsend, Robert M (2012) The Impact of Credit on Village Economies. Am Econ J Appl Econ 4:98-133 |
| Felkner, John S; Townsend, Robert M (2011) The Geographic Concentration of Enterprise in Developing Countries. Q J Econ 126:2005-2061 |
| Kilenthong, Weerachart T; Townsend, Robert M (2011) Information-Constrained Optima with Retrading: An Externality and Its Market-Based Solution. J Econ Theory 146:1042-1077 |
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