David S. Johnson, Stephen B. Reed, and Kenneth J. Stewart The report by the U.S. Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index (known more commonly as the Boskin Report), issued on December 4, 1996, addressed the broad conceptual question of whether a cost-of-living index (COLI) should be the measurement objective of a price index and focused attention on three key problems inherent in ...

Microcredit fights poverty by expanding access to credit. Some microfinance institutions (MFIs) focus on maximizing profits, and do so while lending to the poor. Others seek to maximize access for the poor subject to a budget constraint. Regardless, nearly all MFIs face pressure from policymakers, donors, and investors to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. Economic modeling, policy, and pra...

High growth firms are critical for economic growth yet little is known about their funding arrangements. Examining a survey of over 8,000 UK Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), this paper investigates the financial issues confronting high growth SMEs compared to non-high growth SMEs. The findings show that rapidly growing SMEs are significantly more likely to apply for finance than non-h...

Propensity scorecards allow forecasting, which bank customers would like to be granted new credits in the near future, through assessing their willingness to apply for new loans. Kalman filtering can help to monitor scorecard performance. Data from successive months are used to update the baseline model. The updated scorecard is the output of the Kalman filter. There is no assumption concerning...

We investigate the claim that social rationality explains the emergence of one type of bubble in competitive asset markets that we shall refer to as “credit market bubble,” and that individual rationality explains the subsequent crash. The bubble is defined as a situation where (i) the debt is priced above its intrinsic value and (ii) the debt is rolled over even though each creditor should cas...