Search

This paper compares lending policies of formal, informal and semiformal lenders with respect to household lending in Vietnam. The analysis suggests that the probability of using formal or semiformal credit increases if borrowers provide collateral, a guarantor and/or borrow for business-related activities. The probability of using informal credit increases for female borrowers. It also appears that the probability of using formal credit increases in household welfare up to a certain threshold, but at a decreasing rate. In addition, the paper discerns the determinants of probability of default across lender types. Default risk of formal credit appears to be strongly affected by formal loan contract terms, e.g., loan interest rate and form of loan repayment, whereas default risk on informal loans is significantly related to the presence of propinquity and other internal characteristics of the borrowing household. Overall, the study raises several important implications for the screening, monitoring and enforcement instruments that may be employed by different types of lenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to describe the prevalent forms of intimate partner violence (IPV), and the factors associated with IPV among women and men living in the two migrant communities of Baglung district, Nepal. 357 adult women and men were enrolled following a family model, interviewing young married women with daughter-in-law status in the home, their husbands, and mothers-in-law and fathers-in-laws using an electronic questionnaire. Random effects regression modelling compared men and women, as well as young married women with daughter-in-law status and older women with mothers-in-law with status. 28.6% of women had ever experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner compared to 18.2% of men ever perpetrated these forms of violence against their wives. Being older, male controlling behaviour and poor relations with husband increased women’s IPV in their lifetime while perceptions that the mother-in-law is kind were protective. Being ashamed of being unemployed and childhood trauma were associated with men perpetrating IPV in their lifetime. Borrowing money or food increased young married women’s lifetime IPV risk while mother-in-law cruelty and male control increased older married women’s lifetime IPV exposure. Factors associated with IPV in the past year among men were being younger, job seeking, experiences of childhood trauma and depression exposure among men while difficulty accessing money for emergencies, holding inequitable gender attitudes, and depression was associated with women’s increased IPV exposure. Unemployment stress, holding inequitable gender attitudes and mother-in-law kindness were associated with young women’s increased IPV risk and hunger, mother-in-law cruelty and depression with older women’s IPV risk. There is a need to critically challenge harmful social and gender norms by using approaches that are sensitive to young married women’s position and unequal gender relations in the family. IPV prevention interventions need to employ a holistic approach that combines changing social and gender norms and improving socioeconomic conditions of women living in migrant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we develop a multicriteria decision aid model, to investigate whether it is possible to replicate the credit ratings of Fitch on Asian banks using publicly available data. The model is developed with the Multi-group Hierarchical DIScrimination (MHDIS) approach, following a tenfold cross validation procedure. Five financial variables are selected from a list of nineteen ones through factor analysis. An additional set of five non-financial variables covering ownership, corporate governance, auditing, strength of bank’s franchise and its banking environment is also being used. The results show that equity/customer and short term funding, net interest margin and return on average equity are the most important financial variables. The number of shareholders, the number of subsidiaries and the banking environment of the country in which the banks operate are the most important non-financial ones. In terms of classification accuracies, the results show that the MHDIS model can replicate the credit ratings of Fitch with a satisfactory accuracy and is more efficient than discriminant analysis and ordered logistic regression that are used for comparison purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the international reserve accumulation behavior of emerging and developing economies facing "keeping‐up‐with‐the‐Joneses" externalities. I first document empirical evidence for a significant Joneses effect, which has been particularly persistent in Asia and Latin America since the late 1990s. This peer‐pressure motive could encourage excess reserve hoarding, providing a rationale for cooperation. I then develop a theoretical model of the borrowing economy featuring the Joneses effect and the interdependence between reserves and domestic capital investment. Numerical results show that international cooperation can effectively internalize negative externalities associated with competitive reserve hoarding and induce welfare‐enhancing resource allocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the global financial crisis, European banks sharply contracted foreign claims on recipient economies. This paper examines the impact of that deleveraging on credit supply in recipient economies, with a particular focus on Asia. Identification is achieved by exploiting heterogeneity in the ex-ante patterns of funding reliance on different European banking systems, and in variation in the ratio of local claims in local currency to total foreign claims in recipient economies. These sources of variation are used to create instruments for the deleveraging shock. We find that the contraction of foreign claims in European bank was associated with a substantial reduction in domestic credit supply in a broad sample of countries. However, the credit supply response in Asia was only about half the size of the response in non-Asian countries, possibly due to stronger policy response and healthier local bank balance sheets in the Asian countries at the outset of the crisis.JEL Classifications: G01, G2, E3, E5 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microlending has grown rapidly and now benefits around 250 million people globally, half who would otherwise not have access to credit. Use of social credit systems for microlending risk assessment is most pronounced in Asia, as most Western countries tightly regulate personal information available to lenders. In most of the developing world, geography, social structure, disease, climate and culture have a much stronger influence on credit risk and borrowing than do governmental and corporate systems. In this study, we obtained 784 loan contracts with 3577,912 personal communications and locations. Exploratory analysis found loan default depends on social network structure; graph analysis indicated that those who were likely to default tended to communicate with other likely defaulters. Detailed tests were equivocal, suggesting that social network communication structure provided little additional information to predict default, and may even add noise to the data. Our tests strongly supported the importance of location and proximity to particular sorts of landmarks on the potential for default. Proximity to some landmarks, e.g. city hall, moving companies and train stations, were associated with lower loan default. Others, such as parks, stadiums and bus stations, were correlated with a higher loan default. We restructured our tests based on risk-return versus loan default effect with little change in results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the spillover effects of the United States’ unconventional monetary policy (i.e., quantitative easing programs adopted during 2008–2014) on the Asian credit market. Focusing on cross-border bank lending, we employed firm-level loan data with regard to the syndicated loan market and measured the international bank lending channel through changes in the United States dollar-denominated loans extended to Asian borrowers. We found that the growth of dollar credit in Asia increased substantially in response to the quantitative easing in the US financial market. The results of this study confirm the existence of the bank lending channel in Asia and emphasize the role of credit flows in transmitting financial conditions. The article also provides new evidence of cross-border liquidity spillover in the syndicated loan market. We found that the overall spillover effect was large but differed significantly in Asia by types of borrowing firms, financing purposes, and loan terms at different stages of the quantitative easing programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a global credit cycle outlook as of November 2015. Topics discussed include the affirmation of the global growth forecast of 2.5% for 2015 and 2.7% for 2016, the cautious loosening with near-term downside risks in world corporate credit standards, and the possible static or decline in the world gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate in 2016. Also noted is the continued tightening of credit standards in the emerging markets (EM) of Asia and Latin America.

AbstractThe coexistence of a number of monies with fluctuating exchange rates in modern China and other Asian regions appeared chaotic to foreign observers. However, behind this apparently confused situation lay a multiplicity of currency circuits, each of which consisted of pairing a trade zone with a particular currency. Their concurrence resulted from the difference of temporality and space in monetary usage. The difficulty of matching heterogeneous demands for money to uneven supplies of currencies made for multiple currency circulation. Such a multiplicity caused some merchants to make use of imaginary units which were alive only in account books. Though complementary relationships between incompatible monies prevailed in China, India and other regions, a combination of a remittance system and local credit supply in some societies happened to synchronise currency streams to make a compatible monetary system. This comparative study suggests that currency streams often had to pass through multiple market layers, and that some friction in the streams meant that the market required plural monies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the effects of potential explanatory factors related to the 1997-1998 East Asian financial crisis. Credit system and domestic lending rate of the region; Responsiveness of short-term lending rates; Effects of special interest groups on the financial market.