This paper analyses the welfare effects of microfinance and inflation in developing countries. Therefore, we introduce a moral hazard problem into a monetary search model with money and credit. We show how access to basic financial services affects households' decisions to borrow, to save and to hold money balances. The group lending mechanism of the microfinance institution induces peer monitoring, which in turn enables entrepreneurship. Our main result is that there exists an inflation threshold beyond which entrepreneurship collapses. We show that inflation affects the impact of microfinance on social welfare in a nonlinear way. The positive effect of microfinance is largest for moderate rates of inflation and drops substantially for inflation rates above the threshold.
Diese Dissertation untersucht den Einfluss von geophysikalischen, agrarökologischen und sozioökonomischen Bestimmungsfaktoren auf Veränderungen der Landnutzung während der letzten 25 Jahre in zwei Distrikten der Provinz Dak Lak im Zentralen Hochland Vietnams. Aufbauend auf der Analyse dieser Bestimmungsfaktoren werden die Wirkungen verschiedener politischer Maßnahmen ländlicher Entwicklung auf änderungen der Landbedeckung bewertet. Landsat Satellitenbilder aus den gleichen Anbauperioden der Jahre 1975, 1992 und 2000 werden interpretiert, um Veränderungen der Landbedeckung während dieser Zeitspanne herauszuarbeiten. Primärdaten wurden anhand einer Umfrage in zufällig ausgewählten Dörfern erhoben und erlauben die überprüfung der Einflüsse sozioökonomischer Variablen und Politikindikatoren auf Landnutzungsveränderungen anhand aufgestellter Hypothesen. Verwendete Sekundärdaten über Niederschlag, Bodeneignung und Topographie stammen von meteorologischen Messstationen, einer digitalen Bodenkarte und einem digitalen Höhenmodell. Alle Daten sind in georeferenzierter Form in einem Geographischen Informationssystem gespeichert. Die Daten aus der Dorfumfrage werden mit räumlich expliziten Rasterdaten auf Basis von Dorfeinzugsgebieten verbunden. Diese Dorfeinzugsgebiete basieren auf der Höhe der geschätzten Transportkosten von jeder Rasterzelle in der Forschungsregion zur geographischen Position des nächstgelegenen Dorfes. Ein multinomiales Logitmodell in reduzierter Form wird geschätzt, um den Einfluss der bestimmenden Faktoren auf die Flächennutzung herauszuarbeiten und die Wahrscheinlichkeiten zu berechnen, die eine bestimmte Zelle hat, in eine der fünf Landabdeckungskategorien während einer der zwei Perioden zu fallen.Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die erste Periode von 1975 bis 1992 durch landintensive landwirtschaftliche Expansion und die Umwandlung von Waldflächen in Grasund Ackerland gekennzeichnet ist. Während der zweiten Periode seit 1992 wurden das hohe, mehr arbeits- und kapitalintensive Wachstum im landwirtschaftlichen Sektor durch die Einführung von Düngemitteln, den verbesserten Zugang zu Strassen und Märkten sowie durch die Expansion bewässerter Flächen ermöglicht. Diese Politikstrategien, zusammen mit der Ausweisung weiterer geschützter Waldflächen und Anreizen zur Eindämmung des Wanderfeldbaus während der zweiten Periode, verringerten den Druck auf die Waldflächen bei gleichzeitiger Erhöhung der landwirtschaftlichen Produktivität und der Einkommen für eine wachsende Bevölkerung. Der Waldbestand erhöhte sich in der zweiten Periode hauptsächlich auf Flächen, die früher für Wanderfeldbau verwendet wurden.Politiksimulationen werden modelliert, um Einblicke in die Auswirkungen möglicher Politikinterventionen auf die Flächennutzung zu erhalten. Die Landbedeckung wird für die Simulationen in drei Kategorien aggregiert. Eine Stichprobe von Zellen wird dergestalt ausgewählt, dass die Analyse auf änderungen konzentriert werden kann, die durch anthropogene Eingriffe verursacht wurden. So wird erreicht, dass die simulierten Flächennutzungsänderungen innerhalb bereits genutzter Gebiete und angrenzender Zonen analysiert werden, in welchen der überwiegende Teil der Flächennutzungsänderungen liegt, die für politische Entscheidungsträger relevant sind. Ausserdem werden die Simulationen auf die zweite Periode von 1992 bis 2000 begrenzt, da dies die relevante Periode für mögliche Politikmaßnahmen ist. Die vier Politikszenarien sollen mögliche Auswirkungen politischer Interventionen auf landwirtschaftliche Nutzflächen in der Forschungsregion simulieren. Simulationen werden durchgeführt für reduzierte und höhere Investitionen in die Bewässerungsinfrastruktur, für mehr Flächen unter Waldschutz und für eine Kombination hoher Investitionen in Bewässerungsinfrastruktur zusammen mit erhöhtem Waldschutz, eine häufig erwähnte win-win Politik. Räumlich explizite Simulationen von Politikeingriffen ermöglichen räumlich explizite Ergebnisse, welche die politischen Entscheidungsträger befähigen können, politische Richtlinien für ländliche Regionalentwicklung mit einer besseren räumlichen Zielorientierung zu formulieren und umzusetzen. Die Ergebnisse der Simulationen zeigen begrenzte Flächennutzungsänderungen in allen vier Szenarien. Eine visuelle Interpretation der erwarteten änderungen ermöglicht die Identifizierung vermeintlicher hot-spots, an denen Flächenänderungen geschehen können. Weiterhin läßt eine ex-ante Bewertung der Auswirkungen des jeweiligen Politikeingriffes Rückschlüsse auf die Höhe möglicher Flächennutzungsänderungen zu. ; This dissertation investigates the role of geophysical, agroecological, and socioeconomic determinants of land-use change during the last 25 years in two districts of Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The analysis of these determinants allows to assess the influences of various rural development policies on land-cover changes. Landsat satellite images from the same cropping period of the years 1975, 1992 and 2000 are interpreted to detect land-cover change between the two time periods. A survey in randomly selected villages provides primary recall data on socio-economic and policy variables hypothesized to influence land-use change. Secondary data on rainfall, soil suitability, and topography were obtained from meteorological stations, from a digital soil map and a digital elevation model. All data were spatially referenced using GIS software. Survey data is merged with spatially explicit raster data using accessibility catchments, which are designed to a! pproximate village areas based on the estimated travel costs from each cell to the village location. A reduced-form, multinomial logit model is used to estimate the influence of hypothesized determinants on land use and the probabilities that a certain pixel has one of five land-cover classes during either of the two periods under consideration.Results suggest that the first period from 1975 to 1992 was characterized by land-intensive agricultural expansion and the conversion of forest into grass and agricultural land. During the second period, since 1992, the rapid, more labor- and capital-intensive growth in the agricultural sector was enabled by the introduction of fertilizer, improved access to rural roads and markets, and the expansion of irrigated areas. These policies, combined with the introduction of protected forest areas and policies discouraging shifting cultivation during the second period reduced the pressure on forests while at the same time increasing agricultural productivity and incomes for a growing population. Forest cover during the second period mainly increased due to the regeneration of areas formerly used for shifting cultivation.Policy simulations mimic the influences from potential policy interventions on land use. Land-cover categories for the policy simulations are aggregated to three classes and a spatial sample is drawn to concentrate the analysis on changes influenced by anthropogenic interventions. In that way, the focus of the simulations is on land-use changes within already cultivated areas and at the agricultural frontier where most land-use changes relevant for policy makers take place. The simulations are limited to the second period from 1992 to 2000 as this is the relevant period for potential policy measures.The four rural policy scenarios are carried out for low and high levels of investments in irrigation facilities, for an enlarged area under forest protection and for a combination of high investments in irrigation combined with increased forest protection, an often mentioned first-best policy option. Spatially explicit simulations of these policy interventions facilitate spatially explicit results, which can enable decision makers to formulate and implement geographically targeted rural development interventions. Simulation results suggest modest land-use changes in the expected directions under the four scenarios. A visual assessment of the location of the expected changes enables the identification of probable hotspots of land-cover conversions and allows for an ex-ante evaluation of the impacts of proposed policy interventions on the magnitude of land-use change.
A first wave of contributions to the field of psychology and economics mainly consisted of pointing out problems with traditional economic assumptions and articulating alternatives. By now, research has evolved to what sometimes is referred to as "second-wave behavioral economics": while standard economic questions are addressed with standard economic tools, analysis moves beyond the traditional set of assumptions and on to psychologically better grounded, more realistic assumptions. The first three chapters of my dissertation belong to this field of second-wave behavioral economics, providing possible explanations for observed contractual design or workplace arrangements that may seem puzzling from the perspective of orthodox economic theory. Chapter I, which is based on a joint paper with Fabian Herweg, investigates how interim deadlines affect behavior and performance of a decision maker who faces self-control problems. We develop a model of continuous effort choice over time that shifts the focus from completion of to performance on a single task. In contrast to the existing literature on procrastination, we find that being aware of the own self-control problems can reduce a person's performance as well as her overall well-being. Moreover, we show that being exposed to an interim deadline increases the performance as well as the overall well-being of a hyperbolic discounter, irrespectively of her awareness of own self-control problems. Chapter II, which is based on a joint project with Fabian Herweg and Philipp Weinschenk, re-examines the well-known principal-agent problem with moral hazard. By making the agent's compensation payment depend on a performance measure which is imperfectly correlated with the agent's action choice, the principal can motivate the agent to provide a desired level of effort even though the agent's action is unobservable. By doing so, however, the principal imposes some risk on the agent since the performance measure is only a noisy signal of the agent's effort choice. With human beings typically displaying aversion to risky situations, the principal faces a tradeoff between providing incentives and optimal risk sharing. Under the orthodox notion of risk aversion the agent exhibits local risk neutrality, which implies that paying slightly different wages for different signals improves incentives at negligible costs. In consequence, the optimal contractual arrangement is predicted to make pay dependent on performance in a rather complex way, which is hard to reconcile with contractual form in observed practice. The main finding in this second chapter is that when expectation-based loss aversion is the predominant determinant of the agent's risk preferences, then the optimal contract takes the most basic form an incentive contract possibly can take: the form of a simple (lump-sum) bonus contract. This finding helps to mend, at least to some degree, the often lamented gap between theoretically predicted complexity of contractual arrangements under the orthodox notion of risk aversion on the one hand, and simplicity of observed contracts on the other hand. In Chapter III, I discuss a particular form of workplace design as a promising approach for organizations to cope with problems arising from their members being susceptible to confirmation bias. Confirmation bias refers to the unknowing and unintentional selectivity in the acquisition and use of evidence. In organizations there is ample opportunity for confirmation bias to adversely affect organizational performance, e.g. in the form of a distorted process of performance appraisal. With bad personnel decisions due to an unreliable process of performance appraisal being very costly for an organization, it is little surprising that organizations strive to find a way for coping with raters being susceptible to confirmation bias. In this chapter, I argue that the work practice of job rotation, which makes an employee switch divisions every now and then, and thereby regularly breaks up the matches between the evaluating supervisor and the employee to be evaluated, leads to a more reliable process of performance appraisal — a benefit which may well outweigh the costs usually associated with implementation of this particular form of workplace design. In Chapter IV, which presents a non-behavioral model and is based on a paper with Fabian Herweg, we analyze a formal model of third-degree price discrimination in input markets which allows for costly entry into the downstream industry. Price discrimination is found to foster entry in the sense that whenever entry occurs under uniform pricing, entry also occurs under a discriminatory pricing regime. If downstream firms operate in separate markets, whenever entry occurs under price discrimination but not under uniform pricing, social welfare is strictly higher under the discriminatory pricing regime because opening of a new market increases consumers' surplus and upstream profits, and also gives rise to nonnegative profits for the entering downstream firm. If downstream firms engage in competition, on the other hand, entry occurring under a discriminatory but not under a uniform pricing regime no longer is a sufficient condition for an increase in welfare. The reason is that price discrimination leads to an inefficient allocation of production shares which benefits the upstream supplier and consumers, but does not necessarily make society better off if the cost of entry or the increase in the cost of production is high. Thus, in the light of our findings which identify the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination in input market as highly ambiguous, calls for a determinate legislature which either bans or permits discriminatory pricing practices seem inadequate.
