Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate information asymmetries when delivering credit to the poor. This paper proposes an empirical method to address the potential omitted variable problem resulting from unobserved...

This paper uses the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China as a natural experiment to examine how the housing market reacted to this unforeseen, extreme event. We use a unique transaction dataset for new (under construction) apartment units to analyze the pricing behavior of units in lower versus...

Agglomeration is a location pattern frequently observed in service industries such as hotels. This paper empirically examines whether agglomeration facilitates tacit collusion in the lodging industry using a quarterly data set of hotels in Texas. We jointly model a price and occupancy rate...

Agglomeration is a location pattern frequently observed in service industries such as hotels. This paper empirically examines if agglomeration facilitates tacit collusion in the lodging industry using a quarterly dataset of hotels that operated in rural areas across Texas between 2003 and 2005....

La revisión de varios indicadores económicos muestra que tanto la crisis de alimentos como la crisis económica y financiera recientes tuvieron efectos negativos considerables sobre los países centroamericanos. La primera golpeó a la región entre el 2007 y mediados del 2008, mientras que la...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the degree of co-movement among the nominal price returns of 11 major energy, agricultural, and food commodities using monthly data between 1970 and 2013. The authors study the extent and the time evolution of unconditional and conditional...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of volatility between the corn, wheat, and soybean markets in the United States. Volatility interactions across markets, if they exist, may lower the effectiveness of diversification strategies to mitigate price risks and should be...

A review of various economic indicators shows that both the recent food crisis and the financial and economic crisis have had significant negative effects on the Central American countries. The first jolt to the region came in 2007 and mid-2008, while the second occurred at the end of 2008 and...

While government spending on pro-poor community asset creation and income-transfers could have compounding positive effects on poverty reduction, it is important to first study trends in the allocation of funds, particularly as they relate to the susceptibility of the program to political...