We propose a coherent unified approach to the study of the linkages among economic growth, financial structure, and inequality, bringing together disparate theoretical and empirical literature. That is, we show how to conduct model-based quantitative research on transitional paths. With analytical and numerical methods, we calibrate and make tractable a prototype canonical model and take it to an application, namely, Thailand 1976–1996, an emerging market economy in a phase of economic expansion with uneven financial deepening and increasing inequality. We look at the expected path generated by the model and conduct robustness experiments. Because the actual path of the Thai economy is imagined here to be just one realization of many possible histories of the model economy, we construct a covariance-normalized squared error metric of closeness and find the best-fit simulation. We also construct a confidence region from a set of simulations and formally test the model. We broadly replicate the actual data and identify anomalies.

We propose a model with local spatial markets and heterogeneous agents to understand and evaluate the geographic expansion of bank branches after banking deregulation in Thailand. The model features heterogeneity in financial frictions across regions, with the costs of accessing credit and deposits depending on the distance from the nearest branch. Disciplined by micro estimates of the effects of branch openings, the model reproduces salient regional and aggregate patterns concerning occupational choice, financial access, and inequality. We apply the model to study two counterfactual financial sector policies in distant markets, one subsidizing branches and the other subsidizing household deposits.

This paper studies the assignment of people to projects over time in a model with private information. The combination of risk neutrality with incomplete contracts that restrict the ability of an agent to report on interim states is a force for long-term assignments. More generally, however, rotating agents can be valuable because it conceals information from agents, which mitigates incentive constraints. With complete contracts that communicate interim states, rotation allows for even more concealment possibilities and better-targeted incentives. Furthermore, it allows for the reporting of interim shocks at no cost to the principal. Properties of the production technology are also shown to matter. Substitutability of intertemporal effort is a force for long-term assignments, while coordination with Nash equilibrium strategies is a force for job rotation.

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop computational methods based on mechanism design, linear programming, and maximum likelihood to estimate, compare, and statistically test these alternative dynamic models with financial/information constraints. Our methods can use both cross-sectional and panel data and allow for measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate the models using data on Thai households running small businesses from two separate samples. We find that in the rural sample, the exogenously incomplete saving only and borrowing regimes provide the best fit using data on consumption, business assets, investment, and income. Family and other networks help consumption smoothing there, as in a moral hazard constrained regime. In contrast, in urban areas, we find mechanism design financial/information regimes that are decidedly less constrained, with the moral hazard model fitting best combined business and consumption data. We perform numerous robustness checks in both the Thai data and in Monte Carlo simulations and compare our maximum likelihood criterion with results from other metrics and data not used in the estimation. A prototypical counterfactual policy evaluation exercise using the estimation results is also featured.

Firms in developing countries are embedded in supply chains and labor networks. These linkages may propagate or attenuate shocks. Using panel data from Thai villages, we document three facts: as households facing idiosyncratic shocks adjust their production, these shocks propagate to other households on both the production and consumption sides; propagation is greater via labor than supply chain links; and shocks in denser networks and to more central households propagate more, while access to formal or informal insurance reduces propagation. Social benefits from expanding safety nets may be higher than private benefits.

We propose a framework to create village economic and balance of payments accounts from a micro-level household survey. Using the Townsend Thai data, we create the accounts for villages in rural and semi-urban areas of Thailand. We then study these village economies as small open countries, exploring in particular the relationship between the real and financial variables. We examine cross-village risk-sharing and the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Our results suggest that within-village risk-sharing is better than across-village and, while there is smoothing in both, the mechanisms are different. We also find that, unlike countries, the cross-village capital markets are highly integrated.

Using data on liquidity shortfalls generated by the fraud and failure of a cash-in-transit firm, we demonstrate effects on firms’ trade credit usage. We find that firms manage liquidity shortages by increasing the amount of credit drawn from suppliers and decreasing the amount issued to customers. The compounded trade credit adjustments are on average of similar magnitude as corresponding adjustments in cash holdings, suggesting that trade credit positions are economically important sources of reserve liquidity for firms. The underlying mechanism in trade credit adjustments is in part due to shifts in overdue payments.

Our goal is to evaluate variations in rice yields for likely climate changes for Southeast Asia. To do so we integrate economic modeling with soil science crop growth simulation model, weather simulation model and global climate change models. We estimate impacts of climate change under two different climate scenarios, one assuming high future global anthropogenic pollution emissions,

In economies with a continuum of agents of different types, pecuniary externalities are removed with market exchanges. Agents choose from among various possible prices they want to prevail in the future and buy or sell rights in these market exchanges for future trade. Each agent can choose the exchange it wants without regard to what any other agent is doing. But crucially, the right to trade in each and every exchange is priced. The fee structure has a per-unit price and quantity decomposition: a price, as determined by the exchange chosen, times the quantity of rights acquired.

We incorporate multiagent, principal‐agent theory into general equilibrium analysis. The traded commodities are multiagent contracts that include a description of the individual’s job, effort level, and state‐contingent consumption. These contracts are club goods. The competitive equilibrium and the Pareto program are formulated. The contracts are identified with firms, so the market determines which firms exist and who is assigned to which firm in what capacity. An example is provided in which the internal organization of firms and the distribution of firm classes vary with the aggregate capital endowment and its distribution across agents. A simplex‐based algorithm for solving the Pareto program is developed.