Suchergebnisse

En el presente artículo se elabora un modelo teórico para analizar las condiciones en que un grupo de empresas organizadas en cluster de un país en desarrollo puede asociarse de manera cooperativa y conformar un consorcio de exportación para comercializar colectivamente sus productos en el mercado de un país desarrollado. El consorcio elimina el papel de las empresas intermediarias en el país desarrollado. La calidad esperada de la producción de las empresas del cluster es heterogénea. Las empresas del cluster conocen el tipo de calidad de otras empresas, pero el intermediario extranjero, no. Sin embargo, el intermediario extranjero tiene un costo de comercialización inferior al de las empresas del cluster. Incluso al hacer suposiciones favorables acerca de las ganancias de la cooperación intracluster, el modelo muestra que la comercialización colectiva que se realiza en un consorcio sólo puede ocurrir entre empresas de alta calidad, y sólo dentro de valores de parámetros limitados. El aumento en el diferencial de la calidad entre las empresas de baja y alta calidad amplía el rango de los valores de parámetros para los cuales se presenta la comercialización colectiva de las empresas de alta calidad del cluster. Hay una mayor eficiencia social si el intermediario extranjero comercializa la producción del cluster, pero la creíble amenaza de un consorcio puede conducir a una redistribución del superávit a favor del cluster.

This paper tests an idea from relational contracting theory
[Macauley (1963); North (1990); Greif (1994); Kranton (1996)] that
informal relationships can substitute for formal contract enforcement
through the judicial system, from the analysis of a new survey of the
surgical instrument cluster in Sialkot, Pakistan. Inter-firm trust is
thought to lead to reduced transaction costs (a passive benefit of a
cluster). Considered here are exchanges of goods between clustered
suppliers and their customers, who are either members of the cluster or
firms that interact frequently with it. Inter-firm trust is measured as
the amount of trade credit offered to customers. The results show that
suppliers are more likely to offer trade credit when they believe in the
effectiveness of formal contract enforcement and when they participate
in business networks (proxied by inter-firm communication). There is
also some evidence that customer lock-in helps to develop inter-firm
trust since firms give more credit when relationships are of longer
duration, and as locked-in customers are less able to find alternate
suppliers.

Cousin marriage is an important social institution in many parts of Asia and Africa; yet few studies have looked beyond the health consequences to its role in shaping intrahousehold dynamics. We use a unique survey of households in Pakistan to examine the role of parental consanguinity on education, child work and vaccination, and how those effects differ by gender. We apply ordinary least squares, Tobit, inverse probability weighting with regression adjustment treatment effects and intent-to-treat estimation techniques to a dataset of 1,020 households from 9 districts and control for a rich set of covariates. We model selection into consanguineous marriage using the availability of opposite-gender marriageable cousins. Our results show that the adult children of parents who are first cousins completed fewer years of education and are less likely to have attended school. Educational attainment was curtailed equally for daughters of both marriage arrangements, but consanguineous daughters faced a double burden of consanguinity and gender discrimination. For school-aged children of consanguineous couples, the number of days of school missed is higher in some specifications, but enrolment and educational expenditures are roughly the same as children of parents who are not related or are related more distantly. In contrast, domestic work is somewhat reduced for the offspring of first-cousin parents. Daughters of consanguineous parents are less likely to have received vaccinations, although this effect is weaker in the sample of school-aged children than adult children.

We test the effectiveness of a group-based attendance bonus in a field experiment in a factory in Pakistan, where workers manufacture electric fans in stages using batch-production methods. We find that the group-based attendance bonus increased by more than a quarter the average number of days that the team's attendance target was met. This effect was larger for junior and mid-level workers as compared to senior workers. We find that the bonus incentivized better coordination among workers, especially in the latter part of the month, rather than through higher average attendance. Our experiment's results suggest that temporary incentive programmes may help workers in the transition period to new ways of organizing production and may prove to be a valuable tool for change management. Group-based bonuses offer an alternative to individual or tournament-based incentives based on one's own or relative performance, which may have deleterious effects on intrinsic motivation and pro-social behaviour.

AbstractThe effects of marriage between biological relatives on the incidence of childhood genetic illness and mortality are of major policy significance, as rates of consanguinity exceed 50% in various countries. Empirical research on this question is complicated by the fact that consanguinity is often correlated with poverty and other unobserved characteristics of households, which may have independent effects on mortality. This study has developed an instrumental variables empirical strategy to re-examine this question, based on the concept that the availability of unmarried cousins of the opposite gender at the time of marriage creates quasi-random variation in the propensity to marry consanguineously. Using primary data collected in Bangladesh in 2006–07 and Pakistan in 2009–10, the study found that previous estimates of the impact of consanguinity on child health were biased and falsely precise. The study also empirically investigated the social and economic causes of consanguinity (including marital quality) and concludes that marrying a cousin can have positive economic effects for one's natal family, by allowing deferral of dowry payments until after marriage.