Reliable information on small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. To compensate for this, relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique in the case of SMEs. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze the pricing behavior of banks in a Bertrand competition framework with monitoring costs. We show that the lack ...
Although left-right items are a standard tool of public opinion research, there remains some difference of opinion on the optimal response format. Two disputes can be identified in the literature: (a) whether to provide respondents with a small or large number of answer categories and (b) whether or not to administer the response scale including a midpoint. This study evaluates the performance of the ...
Hedonic regression has become the standard approach for modeling the behavior of house prices. Usually, the common price component is modeled via dummy variables. Based on an approximation for the present value, we deliver an economic interpretation of the common price component. This allows to include explanatory factors like inflation rates, mortgage rates and building permissions. The notional rents ...
Based on a panel of German professional forecasts for 1970 to 2002 we find that growth and inflation forecasts are unbiased and weakly, but not strongly efficient. Besides the effect of diverging forecasting dates, no other substantial differences in forecasting quality are found among forecasters. We argue that is not always advisable to listen to the majority of forecast-ers. The dispersion of forecasts ...
Estimating labor supply functions using a discrete rather than a continuous specification has become increasingly popular in recent years. On basis of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) I test which specification of discrete choice is the appropriate model for estimating labor supply: the standard conditional logit model or the random coefficient model. To the extent that effect heterogeneity is ...
The success of joint liability programs depends on nature and composition of borrowing groups. Group formation is a costly process and in our model these costs vary with the social identity of group partners. We show that risk heterogeneity in a borrowing group may arise due to the social identity of the agents. The presence of caste and gender bias may not resolve the adverse selection and moral hazard ...
