Rather than charging direct fees, banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads. As a result, much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly. In contrast to current statistical practice, dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic...

In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the...

We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (village-level) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought...

The geographic location of banks' branches is used to test whether they are responding to unexploited gains from nonfarm rural development in Bangladesh. The branch locations of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank are compared with those of traditional banks. The potential gains from switching out of...

The measurement of bank output, a difficult and contentious issue, has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years. In this paper, we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank...

Banks do not charge explicit fees for many of the services they provide but the service payment is bundled with the offered interest rates. This output therefore has to be imputed using estimates of the opportunity cost of funds. We argue that rather than using the single short-term, low-risk...

Relative productivity levels are used intensively in analyzing cross-country growth, but often based on crude measures and with little information on their reliability. In this paper, we provide a new framework to estimate purchasing power parities and productivity levels with associated...

Cross-country studies of economic growth have been hampered by the scarcity of reliable data on productivity at the sector level, see Bernard and Jones (AER, 2001) and Rogerson (JPE, 2008). We bring together literature on industry prices, human capital and capital assets to construct...