Abstract
We study the personal credit market using unique individual-level data covering fintech and traditional lenders. We show that fintech lenders acquire market share by lending first to ...higher-risk borrowers and then to safer borrowers, and rely mainly on hard information to make credit decisions. Fintech borrowers are significantly more likely to default than neighbor individuals with the same characteristics borrowing from traditional financial institutions. Furthermore, they tend to experience a short-lived reduction in the cost of credit, because their indebtedness increases more than non-fintech borrowers after loan origination. However, fintech lenders’ pricing strategies are likely to take this into account.
Local governments operate in contexts that significantly vary in their complexity, turbulence, and munificence. Such variations in context have important implications for organizational outcomes and ...practices, including budgetary orientations. To evaluate public sector organizational practices, we focus on budget functions in California county proposed budgets during 2012-2017. These public documents present a wealth of untapped information, which shed light on a number of key organizational variables of interest. Computational text analysis methods offer a highly generalizable means of tapping into public documents in order to generate objective organizational data. Using budget narratives and a general method for analyzing texts offered by the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach, we assess the relevance of organizational context for control, management, and planning budget functions.
Abstract
We evaluate the impact of a reduction in the child qualifying age for the One-Parent Family Payment in Ireland. From 2012 to 2015, the child qualifying age was reduced from 18 to 7 years. ...Lone parents who no longer qualified for the payment, based on the age of their child, could avail of Jobseekers Transitional Payment, which involves a labour activation component. The reforms led to an increase in the average hours worked of lone parents of between 2 and 5 h per week. Lone parents impacted by the policy were 13 percentage points more likely to be working. In addition, we find an increase in household income of between 9% and 12%, and an increase of between 23% and 29% in earnings from employment. Finally, the policy was associated with a 10–14 percentage point reduction in the poverty rate of lone parents.
This study examined the relative and joint effects of credit, savings, remittances and micro-insurance on household poverty. Data on 30,527 households obtained from the Ghana Living Standards Survey ...rounds six (GLSS6) and seven (GLSS 7) were used. Analytical approaches employed were the ordinary least squares, two-stage least squares (2SLS), probit, ordered probit, simultaneous quantile regression (SQR) and the dominance analysis. Results show that, while in general financial products independently contribute to reduction in household poverty, their complementarities (credit, micro-insurance and savings (CIS) have the greatest effects. Remarkably, the SQR and ordered probit estimates show that, while the effect of credit is strongest among those in middle-income households, savings have the greatest poverty reduction effect among those in the lowest quantile and the very poor. This finding is further corroborated by the dominance analysis estimates. Policy wise, if the key objective for policy makers is to reduce poverty, then the greatest impact is through innovative practices such as offering financial products in bundles/packages, while identifying lagging households and promoting financial outreach to these households should be an integral part of Ghana's anti-poverty programmes.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Bayesian vector autoregressions that allow for non-Gaussian, heteroscedastic and time-dependent disturbance structures for models involving a large number of variables have been recently introduced ...in the literature. A comparison of forecasting accuracy is carried out using regional time series for models based on the conventional assumption of homoscedastic Gaussian disturbances versus models that allow for non-Gaussian, heteroscedastic and time-dependent disturbance structures. The comparison was based on 12-month-ahead forecast for the 48 lower US states over two three-year time periods, 2012–2014 and 2015–2017. The non-Gaussian models were found to provide large improvements in both forecast accuracy and forecast precision for almost all states. In addition, we explored a (non-spatial) ridge-type (Minnesota) prior distribution for the parameters versus a spatial prior distribution that utilizes information on growth rates from neighboring regions. This comparison resulted in smaller improvements in forecast accuracy and precision than those associated with relaxing the assumption of homoscedastic Gaussian disturbances.
The present study was designed to determine the relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance in an international setting. Financial and governance data sourced from the Datastream ...database for a sample of Japanese and UK firms between 2012 and 2017 are used. First, we examine the direct effect of several corporate governance mechanisms on tax avoidance. Second, we divide the full sample into two groups (common law and code law legal system) to explore the relationship between law, corporate governance, and tax avoidance. We use both univariate and feasible generalized least square (FGLS) regression methods to examine our hypotheses. This study finds that the board size, independent directors, and the presence of women on boards of directors reduce the likelihood of tax avoidance. However, we find an insignificant association between ownership concentration and tax avoidance. Second, it also finds that firms in countries with higher country-level governance engage in less tax avoidance. The results also suggest that the role of corporate governance is more pronounced for firms operating in common law countries than those in code law countries. This manuscript is one of the few studies that examine the relationship between corporate governance and tax avoidance in an international setting with different legal and institutional environment. This relationship differs across the two countries. This paper clearly identifies implications for research, practice, and society. It documents that when a country implements a good system of governance, which targets improving transparency and accountability, it will lead to less corporate tax avoidance.
This paper updates the Skoog-Ciecka-Krueger (2011) study which used 2005-09 U.S. population labor force data to estimate worklife expectancies. This update presents estimates using 2012-17 labor ...force data for persons ages 18 and over by sex and education. These updated estimates are presented as before as a set of worklife tables, including extended probability calculations and other statistical measures useful to forensic economists. Transition probabilities, by age, gender, and education, are contained in the electronic supplementary materials.
In this paper, we estimate characteristics of years to final separation from the labor force. We use data for the same time period, the same data set, the same education groups for both genders, and ...similar recursive methods as in our paper on years of labor force activity (Skoog, Ciecka, and Krueger, 2019). Years of labor market activity are a subset of years to final separation from the labor force, with the latter including any years of inactivity that occur prior to final labor force separation. The last set of extended tables for years to final separation from the labor force appeared in 2003 and was based on 1997-98 data (Skoog and Ciecka, 2003).
Analyzing changes in the role and place of NATO, European integration, and Franco-American relations in foreign policy discourse under Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, this book ...provides an original perspective on French foreign policy and its identity construction.
The book employs a novel research design for the analysis of foreign policies, which can be used beyond the case of France, by combining the discourse theory of the Essex School with Interpretive Policy Analysis to examine political ideas and how they are organized into a foreign policy identity. On these grounds, the volume undertakes a comparative analysis of parliamentary and executive discourse of President Chirac’s failed attempt at NATO reintegration in the 1990s, Sarkozy’s successful attempt in the 2000s, and the Libyan War. Ostermann depicts French foreign policy and identity as turning away from the European Union, atlanticizing, and losing its American nemesis. As a result, France uses a much more pragmatic, de-unionized, and pro-American strategy to implement foreign policy objectives than before.
Offering a new and innovative explanation for a major change in French foreign policy and grand strategy, this book will be of great interest to scholars of NATO, European defense cooperation, and foreign policy.
Bible Nation Moss, Candida R; Baden, Joel S
2019, 2017., 20170922, 2017, 2019-07-16, 2017-10-03
eBook
How the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make America a "Bible nation"
Like many evangelical Christians, the Green family of Oklahoma City believes ...that America was founded on a "biblical worldview as a Christian nation." But the Greens are far from typical evangelicals in other ways. The billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby, a huge nationwide chain of craft stores, the Greens came to national attention in 2014 after successfully suing the federal government over their religious objections to provisions of the Affordable Care Act. What is less widely known is that the Greens are now America's biggest financial supporters of Christian causes-and they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in an ambitious effort to increase the Bible's influence on American society. InBible Nation, Candida Moss and Joel Baden provide the first in-depth investigative account of the Greens' sweeping Bible projects and the many questions they raise.
Bible Nationtells the story of the Greens' rapid acquisition of an unparalleled collection of biblical antiquities; their creation of a closely controlled group of scholars to study and promote their collection; their efforts to place a Bible curriculum in public schools; and their construction of a $500 million Museum of the Bible near the National Mall in Washington, D.C.Bible Nationreveals how these seemingly disparate initiatives promote a very particular set of beliefs about the Bible-and raise serious ethical questions about the trade in biblical antiquities, the integrity of academic research, and more.
Bible Nationis an important and timely account of how a vast private fortune is being used to promote personal faith in the public sphere-and why it should matter to everyone.
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