Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Formal Savings & Informal Insurance in Villages: A Field Experiment on Indirect Effects of Financial Deepening on Safety Nets of the Ultra-Poor(2011) Flory, Jeffrey Allen; Leonard, Kenneth L.; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis exploits a unique micro dataset that uses a natural field experiment to identify indirect effects of formal savings access on de facto ineligibles residing in the same community. Despite widespread interest in microfinance as a poverty-reduction tool, the indirect effects on the very poor of expanding formal financial services remain largely unexplored. This study examines evidence from a large field experiment which helps fill this gap. It also contributes to an important emerging literature on the indirect impacts of policy interventions in developing countries, often (incompletely) evaluated solely on the basis of how they impact participants and beneficiaries. In developing regions, households vulnerable to extreme poverty often benefit from long-standing local safety nets based on cash gifts and other transfers from relatives and friends, which help them smooth consumption across food-deficits and household shocks. To date, little is known about how these pre-existing practices are affected as community members begin adopting newly available formal financial services, and there remains much unexplored in the interaction of formal financial markets with informal safety nets. This paper addresses that gap by examining how formal savings expansion affects inter-household wealth transfers, with a particular emphasis on receipts by the most vulnerable. Using a rich panel dataset from Central Malawi that includes over 2,000 households, I find that experimentally boosting local savings uptake in rural areas leads to a strong positive effect on assistance receipts by non service-users during peak periods of hunger. The difference is strongest among the most vulnerable households. That is, the entrance of formal savings appears to complement local informal support systems for the highly vulnerable through an indirect mechanism, channeling greater wealth to such households during periods of food-deficits. The positive impacts of formal savings expansion on non service-users suggests that formal savings may have substantially greater benefits than would be suggested by focusing exclusively on the impacts experienced by the service-users themselves.Item Two Essays on Recent Innovations in Finance: Microfinancing and Floating Rate Convertibles(2010) Padhi, Michael Stanley; Phillips, Gordon; Business and Management: Finance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The first essay provides theory concerning the risk-taking incentives of microfinance borrowers in varying cases: individual liability, group liability without social sanctions, and group liability with social sanctions. The results provide insight into how a community's social capital and a country's credit rights interact to induce recipients of microfinance programs to take risk. Consistent with recent anecdotal evidence that suggests a "dark side" to microfinance, the results show that communal ties among joint liability borrowing groups may not lead to higher repayment rates and may have worse welfare effects on the recipients by making the poorest group members unwilling to take the risks necessary to grow a business. The second essay considers floating rate convertibles (FRCs). FRCs are a category of PIPE securities that receive negative associations in both the academic and professional literature. This study sheds light on the managerial relationship to the decision to issue FRCs and to the variation in market response to these issues. One main result of the study identifies influence of the CFO relative to the CEO as significant in the decision to issue FRCs and in the market's immediate reaction to the issuance. Another main result is that FRC issuing firms with CFOs without prior public equity issuance experience have significantly negative long run abnormal returns, whereas FRC issuing firms with experienced CFOs do not.Item The Relationship between Child Labor and Microfinance: Evidence from Rural Bangladesh(2009) Khadka, Manbar Singh; Leonard, Kenneth L; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper analyzes the relationship between availability of microfinance and child labor in rural Bangladesh. Using household-level fixed effect in panel data, this paper shows that the stock of women's recent loans negatively impacts child labor. A 10 percent increase in the stock of recent borrowing by women reduces child labor supply by 2.58 percent. By contrast, the paper does not find any significant effect of male credit on child labor.