Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) have risen to the forefront as invaluable institutions in the development process. Nevertheless, capital constraints have hindered the expansion of microfinance programs such that the demand for financial services still far exceeds the currently available supply....

Despite the fact that 529 College Savings Plans have existed for over a decade, there has been limited scholarly attention on investment questions related to this savings vehicle. In some of the first academic literature on this topic, Alexander and Luna (Supplement 2005) identified a surprising...

Economic research has documented many economic affects of offspring gender on parental behavior. However, an open question exists as to whether offspring gender has any influence on parental investment decision making. Specifically, I investigate whether female offspring have an impact on...

How high is too high? Soaring Interest Rates and the Elasticity of Demand for Microcredit

This paper analyzes serial correlation in stock returns, and informational role of volume and volatility in Polish and Slovakian stock markets. Results indicate that prices tend to overshoot to new information in the Slovakian market, while new information gets impounded into prices with a...

This study focuses on the possible role of microfinance institutions to mobilize savings among the low-income entrepreneurs who already use these organizations as sources of credit. The evidence is drawn from a pilot project carried out in 1997 and 1998 in Kenya and Uganda. Possible constraints...

sector employment, uncovered sector employment, and unemployment. The impact of these labor market adjustments on absolute poverty will depend on how the pattern of employment composition changes within households and on how income is shared within households. An earlier paper (Fields and...

A real option analysis of dry-grind corn ethanol plants compared to a standard net present value analysis (NPV) shows that the option values increase entry prices and lower exit prices of investment and disinvestment considerably. For a large plant, the gross margin of ethanol price over the...

This paper empirically estimates cost functions for two milking technologies, stanchion and parlor, using farm level data from New York dairy farms for the years 1993 through 2002. A translog cost function was estimated along with input cost share equations for each milking technology by...

We study the impact of analyst forecasts on prices to determine whether investors learn about analyst accuracy. Our test market is the crude oil futures market. Prices rise when analysts forecast a decrease (increase) in crude supplies. In the 15 minutes following supply realizations, prices...