The purpose of this study is to assess how information sharing offices affect loan price and quantity in the African banking industry. The empirical evidence is based on a panel of 162 banks in 42 countries for the period 2001-2011. From the Generalised Method of Moments, public credit registries decrease loan price. With instrumental Quantile Regressions, two main findings are established. Pub...

Designed to compete with fiat currencies, bitcoin proposes it is a crypto-currency alternative. Bitcoin makes a number of false claims, including: bitcoin can be a reserve currency for banking; hoarding equals saving; and that we should believe bitcoin can expand by deflation to become a global transactional currency supply. Bitcoin’s developers combine technical implementation proficiency with...

Recent research has begun to question the importance of forecasts to sell-side analysts. Prior research established the co-existence of longer horizon optimism and short-term pessimism in sell-side forecasts. These factors motivate us to explore a new phenomenon – crowdsourcing, as an alternative source of forecasts. We obtain revenue and earnings forecasts from estimize, an entity which crowds...

We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts during the period mid-1997 and 2004. The buy-side firm’s analysts issued less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger market capitalizations and lower return volatility than their sell-side peers, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of ...

Bringing Financial Literacy and Education to Low and Middle Income Countries: The Need to Review, Adjust, and Extend Current Wisdom This paper presents a World Bank led and Russia trust fund financed work program to measure financial capability and the effectiveness of financial education in low and middle income countries. The two activities and their staging have been motivated by the lessons...

In this paper, we examine the risk characteristics and capital adequacy of hedge funds using Value-at-Risk (based on Extreme Value Theory) as the criterion for measuring risk and estimating capital requirements. Using extensive data on nearly thirteen hundred live and dead hedge funds, we find that the vast majority of funds are adequately capitalized. In addition, a large fraction of hedge fun...

This study examines the proposition that political business cycle theory is relevant to private foreign lenders to developing countries. We find that: credit rating agencies downgrade developing country ratings more often in election years, and do so by approximately one rating level; bond spreads are higher in the 60 days before an election compared to spreads in the 60 days after an election;...

The Sharpe ratio is adequate for evaluating investment funds when the returns of those funds are normally distributed and the investor intends to place all his risky assets into just one investment fund. Hedge fund returns differ significantly from a normal distribution. For this reason, other performance measures for hedge fund returns have been proposed in both the academic and practiceorient...

Insurance has an intertemporal aspect as insurance premia have to be paid upfront. We argue that the financing aspect of insurance is key to understanding basic insurance patterns. In a model with limited enforcement, we show that insurance is globally monotone increasing in household net worth and income, incomplete, and precautionary. These results hold in economies with income risk, durable ...

In a sample of Tanzanian formal sector workers the vast majority have a desire for working longer hours in their main job, and supplement earnings through participation in informal production. Determinants of participation in informal production are examined through estimation of structural-form Logit models. A new way around the problem of measuring incomes from informal production is suggeste...