R ecently, there has been a trend toward loan guarantee programs over other programs that support the credit market. From 1970 to 1998, the real value of outstanding federal loan guarantees rose at an accelerated pace, while the real value of direct loans, the other major government loan program, has remained about the same (see Figure 1). In particular, the Small Business Administration (SBA),...

We describe the structure and present situation of the Chinese healthcare system and discuss its primary problems and challenges. We discuss problems with inefficient burden sharing, adverse provider incentives and huge inequities, and seek explanations in the structural features of the Chinese healthcare system. The current situation will be further challenged in the future by an aging populat...

The magnitude of provider uncompensated care has become an important public policy issue. Yet existing measures of uncompensated care are flawed because they compare uninsured payments to list prices, not to the prices actually paid by the insured. We address this issue using a novel source of data from a vendor that processes financial data for almost 4000 physicians. We measure uncompensated ...

In a stylized continuous-time model of a small open economy with perfect capital mobility and a pegged exchange rate, I analyze an experiment in which domestic residents expect a future devaluation. Taking the public’s expectations as exogenous and allowing them to be divergent, I analyze in a short time period before the expected devaluation takes place how transactions of short-term collatera...

The study presents the issues of rural women in Sadar Upazila of Gazipur district considering their participation in micro credit programs for poverty alleviation. Data were collected from 75 BRAC women beneficiaries of four villages following random sampling techniques. On the basis of credit, the respondent’s have been classified into three categories. These are: i) A-small credit (up to Tk.4...

This paper examines if the market rationally prices the loan loss provisions, and the fair value gains and losses of US banks. We also model the discretionary components of loan loss provisions and fair value gains and losses, and test if the discretionary components are priced differently from their non-discretionary counterparts. We find little evidence that the market misprices operating cas...

This paper can be thought of as a companion paper to Van Loan’s The Ubiquitous Kronecker Product paper [23]. We collect and catalog the most useful properties of the Kronecker product and present them in one place. We prove several new properties that we discovered in our search for a Stochastic Automata Network preconditioner. We conclude by describing one application of the Kronecker product,...

This paper presents a novel model of the lending process that takes into account that loan officers must spend time and effort to originate new loans. Besides generating predictions on loan officers’ compensation and its interaction with the loan review process, the model sheds light on why competition could lead to excessively low lending standards. We also show how more intense competition ma...

This study evaluated micro-credit programmes of six leading NGOs/MFIs (BRAC, Grameen Bank, PROSHIKA, ASA, SSS and TMSS) in terms of the clients’ views towards the programmes. The objective of this project is to develop a selection criterion to identify the efficient programme. A total of 406 members from the selected NGOs/MFIs operating micro-credit programmes in Dhaka, Mymensingh, Sherpur, Net...