"This investigation proposes a conceptual framework for measurement necessary for an analysis of household finance and economic development. The authors build on and, where appropriate, modify corporate financial accounts to create balance sheets, income statements, and statements of cash flows...

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...

We use a model of optimal portfolio choice to measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages. There is substantial heterogeneity in risk preferences, positively correlated in most villages with alternative estimates based on a full risk-sharing model.

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households’ risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is...

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 look at liquidity constraints and the financing of household investment in fixed assets. We find that rural households in our sample, especially the poor, seem to face liquidity constraints. The constraints are partially mitigated by kinship networks in the village. When we further analyze...