When Do Special Interests Run Rampant?


Book Description

Government responses to banking crises are less likely to favor special interest groups when elections are near, voters are better informed about the costs of inefficient government decisions, and governments have multiple veto players. Keefer investigates the political determinants of government decisions that benefit special interest groups, especially government decisions to deal with banking crises. He finds that the better informed the voters, the more proximate elections, and the larger the number of political veto players (conditional on the costs to voters of relevant policy decisions), the smaller the government's fiscal transfers are to the financial sector and the less likely the government is to exercise forbearance in dealing with insolvent financial institutions.




The Value of Relationship Banking During Financial Crises


Book Description

Relationship banking, with surviving banks, has a positive value during a systemic financial crisis. For many viable small and medium-size businesses in the Republic of Korea, relationship banking reduced liquidity constraints and thus diminished the probability of unwarranted bankruptcy during the country's financial crisis of 1997-98.




The Design of Incentives for Health Care Providers in Developing Countries


Book Description

Whatever the theoretical attractiveness of certain policy options, the fact that public employees are people who make independent decisions about their careers and lifestyles can set bounds on how well government agencies can deliver promised services, such as universal health care, including in rural areas. Hammer and Jack examine the design and limitations of incentives for health care providers to serve in rural areas in developing countries. Governments face two problems: it is costly to compensate well-trained urban physicians enough to relocate to rural areas, and it is difficult to ensure quality care when monitoring performance is costly or impossible.




Financing the Future


Book Description

A model developed to predict demand for infrastructure in Latin America performs reasonably well for power and telecommunications, and less well for water and sanitation (for which data are scarce) and transport infrastructure (which is less closely related to per capita income). The model projects a doubling of telephone mainlines per capita, a steady increase in power infrastructure, steady growth in road infrastructure, and small increases in water and sanitation coverage. To assess five-year demand for infrastructure investment in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the private sector's role in meeting this demand, Fay developed a model to predict future demand for infrastructure, defined as what consumers and producers would ask for, given their income and level of economic activity.




The Uniqueness of Short-term Collateralization


Book Description

A secured letter-of-credit loan allows a lender to make larger loans than would be permissible on an unsecured basis, maximizing a risky borrower's investment capital. Empirical evidence shows that secured letters of credit are used by borrowers who are informationally opaque and have higher observable risk. Such borrowers also have fewer growth opportunities and are less likely to pay dividends.




Convexity and Sheepskin Effects in the Human Capital Earnings Function


Book Description

Data on education in the Philippines show that there are large differences in the private rate of return to education by level: the wage premia associated with an additional year of schooling are about twice as large at the university level as they are at the primary school level. In addition, there are large "sheepskin effects." Completion of the last year of schooling within a given level is rewarded disproportionately, particularly for university graduates.




Infrastructure Coverage and the Poor


Book Description

The poor in most parts of the world may have electricity (especially in urban areas), but they rarely have water, sewer, and telephone services. When they gain access to local services, however, many do decide to connect.




Measuring Poverty Dynamics and Inequality in Transition Economies


Book Description

Estimates of income inequality and the dynamics of poverty are highly sensitive to measurement error and transitory shocks in micro-level data. The apparent high levels of economic mobility in Poland and Russia are driven largely by transitory shocks and noisy data. There is a real risk of an entrenched underclass emerging in these transition economies.




Administrative Costs and the Organization of Individual Retirement Account Systems


Book Description

Organizing individual retirement accounts through the institutional market and with constrained choice could substantially lower administrative costs. The tradeoff: rebidding problems, weaker performance incentives, inflexibility in the face of unforeseen contingencies, and an increased probability of corruption, collusion, and regulatory capture.




Catastrophe Risk Management


Book Description

In providing support for disaster-prone areas such as the Caribbean, the development community has begun to progress from disaster reconstruction assistance to funding for investment in mitigation as an explicit tool for sustainable development. Now it must enter a new phase, applying risk transfer mechanisms to address the financial risk of exposure to catastrophic events that require funding beyond what can be controlled solely through mitigation and physical measures.