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Publications
Why Micro-Credit May Leave Women Worse Off: Non-Cooperative Bargaining and the Marriage Game in South Asia
By Sujata Balasubramanian
Micro-credit programmes targeting women continue to grow in South Asia, although research suggests that wives frequently hand over loans to their husbands. Women may also be unable to control the income generated by micro-enterprises. This article presents an intra-household bargaining model explaining these findings and showing how credit may leave women worse off, while benefiting men. This game-theoretic model also shows why a woman might rationally choose to give her loan to her husband even though she does not expect to benefit and knows he may not repay.
Is the PDS Already a Cash Transfer? Rethinking India’s Food Subsidy Policies
By Sujata Balasubramanian
Critics argue that India’s mismanaged Public Distribution System (PDS), which sells subsidised cereals to poor families, should be replaced by cash transfers. Others fear cash may be misused. Using National Sample Survey data, this article demonstrates that families treat additional PDS subsidies wholly as a source of cash – exactly like a cash transfer. More worryingly, cereal consumption has not increased, despite higher real subsidies. Moreover, neither the PDS nor cash transfers are likely to raise total food expenditure in poor families.
Pandemic and containment policies in open economy
By Juanyi Xu, Yousha Liang, Kang Shi, Junjie Tang
This paper analyzes the economic and epidemiological externalities of containment policies in an open-economy setting with firm entry and exit, SIR virus transmission, and a production network. Motivated by empirical evidence that non-pharmaceutical intervention policies (such as workplace closure or social distancing) are substitutes for medication-related policies (healthcare facilities and vaccine development), the authors incorporated four types of containment policies into their model.
Resource Allocation Among Competing Innovators
By Yangguang Huang, Ying-Ju Chen, Pin Gao, Xiaoshuai Fan
Many innovative products are designed to satisfy the demand of specific target consumers; thus, the innovators will inevitably compete with each other in the product market. This paper investigates how a profit-maximizing principal should properly allocate her limited resources to support the innovations of multiple potentially competing innovators. The study finds that, as the available resources increase, the optimal diversification of investment may first increase and then decrease.
Expanding Footprints: The Impact of Passenger Transportation on Corporate Locations
By Yatang Lin, Yu Qin, Johan Sulaeman, Jubo Yan, Jialiang Zhang
This article investigates how transportation networks shape firms' geographic footprint by reducing monitoring costs of distant investments. Exploiting the staggered expansions of China's passenger high-speed rail (HSR) network, the authors document that the amount of intercity investment between a pair of cities increases by 45% with the introduction of an HSR line connecting the cities. They enhance the causal inference by applying high-dimensional fixed effects, and focusing on city pairs that are "accidentally" connected in the network.
When student incentives do not work: Evidence from a field experiment in Malawi
By Hyuncheol Bryant Kim, James Berry, Hyuk Harry Son
James Berry, Hyuncheol Bryant Kim and Hyuk Harry Son study how the structure of tournament incentive schemes in education can influence the level and distribution of student outcomes. Through a field experiment among upper-primary students in Malawi, they evaluate two scholarship programs: a Population-based scholarship that rewarded overall top performers on an exam and a Bin-based scholarship that rewarded the top performers within smaller groups of students with similar baseline scores.
Agglomeration, Misallocation, and (the Lack of) Competition
By Yao Amber Li, Wyatt J. Brooks, Joseph P. Kaboski
Industrial agglomeration policies may limit competition. This study develops, validates, and applies a novel approach for measuring competition based on the comovement of markups and market shares among firms in the same location and industry. Then this study develops a model of how this reduction in competition affects aggregate income. In this paper, the authors apply their approach to the well-known special economic zones (SEZs) of China. This paper estimates that firms in SEZs exhibit cooperative pricing almost three times as intensively as firms outside SEZs.
Indemnification, Monitoring, and Competition: Evidence from R&D Contracts
By Xinyu Hua, Di Guo , Kun Jiang
This article examines the adoption of indemnification clauses in research and development (R&D) contracts, in which a firm commits to reimbursing its agent against liabilities and legal costs. Indemnification achieves efficient risk sharing but dilutes the agent’s incentives to take precautions. Such incentives may be restored if the firm offers contingent indemnification and monitors the agent’s activities. Additionally, tougher competition can motivate the firm and agent to take more aggressive R&D activities, which leads to higher liability risks.
A Comparative Analysis of Research and Development Spending and Total Factor Productivity Growth in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Singapore
By Naubahar Sharif, Kevin Chandra, Athar Mansoor, Kirti Bhasin Sinha
In this paper, we focus on three locations in the Asia-Pacific region—Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Singapore—to analyse the impact of variations in research and development (R&D) spending on total factor productivity (TFP) growth. In each of the three cases, we compare and contrast the role of public and private R&D in boosting TFP growth as well as the pattern of causality involving public and private R&D and the capacity of both types of R&D to generate economic spillovers.
A Comparative Analysis of Innovation Policies in Hong Kong and Shenzhen Within the Greater Bay Area Initiative
By Naubahar Sharif, Kevin Chandra
Combining documentary analysis with hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), we conduct a comparative study of innovation policies in two municipalities included in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative—the Chinese government’s plan to link eleven cities into an economic and business hub. After identifying innovation policies/agencies in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, we apply the HCA to compare similarities and differences between their innovation policies and assess how these policies align with the ‘cross-border regional innovation system’ (CBRIS) conceptual approach.
From Creative Destruction to Creative Appropriation: A Comprehensive Framework
By Naubahar Sharif, Jack Linzhou Xing
The Roles of Supply Network Centralities in Firm Performance and the Moderating Effects of Reputation and Export-orientation
By Naubahar Sharif, Antonio K. W. Lau, Yuya Kajikawa