Robert M Townsend
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 984130 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Robert M Townsend |
| NOMBRES | Robert M |
| APELLIDO | Townsend |
| FIRMA | TOWNSEND R M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7992-6775 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 123 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1979 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
A unicorn and an echo
How do American higher-education leaders handle a problem that defies their prior experience? Academic leaders in the U.S. are handling contemporary struggles with varying approaches. Most are keep
Inequality and Globalization
Dynamic Bank Expansion
We propose a model with local spatial markets and heterogeneous agents to understand and evaluate the geographic expansion of bank branches after banking deregulation in Thailand. The model features heterogeneity in financial frictions across regions, with the costs of accessing credit and deposits depending on the distance from the nearest branch. Disciplined by micro estimates of the effects of branch openings, the model reproduces salient regi…
New England Town Meeting and the Cultivation of Deliberative Play
Participants of New England town meeting must follow protocols to participate in this direct democratic process. Over the past 200 years, the protocols have been enacted and adapted by participants in small towns across the region. Within annual meetings, one can find small breaches that could be interpreted as playful acts. In this paper, we use the comic frame as a theoretical lens to interpret instances of such play within the rhetorical delib…
An Enduring System of Local Deliberative Democracy
This essay examines the legal framework for local deliberative democracy in Massachusetts, within the legislature known as “town meeting.” We review the trajectory of this system of local government allowing direct exercise of citizen power via deliberative governance. We focus on the current framework of state and local laws that were created to support and direct local deliberative systems in Massachusetts with greater attention to functional e…
‘Eligible to be heard’ in transportation planning
Planners often use the phrase ‘hard-to-reach’ to describe youth, people of color, and people with low incomes, people from whom they need information but are unsuccessful in reaching. Consideration of cultural premises for communicating can help explain why some people are ‘under-heard’ rather than ‘hard-to-reach.’ This study uses cultural discourse analysis to study under-represented community group deliberations about transportation, convened t…
A Market-Based Solution for Fire Sales and Other Pecuniary Externalities
We show how bundling, exclusivity and additional markets internalize fire sale and other pecuniary externalities. Ex ante competition can achieve a constrained efficient allocation. The solution can be put rather simply: create segregated market exchanges which specify prices in advance and price the right to trade in these markets so that participant types pay, or are compensated, consistent with the market exchange they choose and that type's e…
Curbing Shocks to Corporate Liquidity
Using data on liquidity shortfalls generated by the fraud and failure of a cash-in-transit firm, we demonstrate effects on firms’ trade credit usage. We find that firms manage liquidity shortages by increasing the amount of credit drawn from suppliers and decreasing the amount issued to customers. The compounded trade credit adjustments are on average of similar magnitude as corresponding adjustments in cash holdings, suggesting that trade credit…
Village and Larger Economies
I have spent close to 20 years cataloging transactions between households in Thai villages, along with a research team. Just this past summer, we documented a number of ways in which even relatively poor villages have money markets not dissimilar in some ways from New York financial markets, with borrowing and repayment passing along links in credit chains. In another project, we have been looking at month-by-month school attendance, grade level …
Measuring the return on household enterprise
Town Meeting as a Communication Event
Town meeting deliberation and decision making form a communicative event, the act sequence of which ensures that participants enact a democratic process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 1999 to 2000, documents, interviews, and videotapes and transcripts of meetings, I analyze the Amherst, Massachusetts town meeting. Performances of rhetorical interactions, over time, develop norms for discourse that participants use to make sense of and ev…
Patterns of Rainfall Insurance Participation in Rural India
Take-up of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India decreases with basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations, increases with household wealth, and decreases with binding credit constraints. These results are consistent with the predictions of a simple neoclassical model with borrowing constraints. Other patterns are less consistent with the benchmark model. For example, participation…
Using Repayment Data to Test across Models of Joint Liability Lending
Theories rationalising joint liability lending are rich in implications for repayment rates. We exploit this fact to test four diverse models. We show that the models' repayment implications do not always coincide. For example, higher correlation of output and borrowers' ability to act cooperatively can raise or lower repayment, depending on the model. Data from Thai borrowing groups suggest that repayment is affected negatively by the joint liab…
Distinguishing Limited Liability from Moral Hazard in a Model of Entrepreneurship
We present and estimate a model in which the choice between entrepreneurship and wage work may be influenced by financial market imperfections. The model allows for limited liability, moral hazard, and a combination of both constraints. The paper uses structural techniques to estimate the model and identify the source of financial market imperfections using data from rural and semiurban households in Thailand. Structural, nonparametric, and reduc…
Firms as Clubs in Walrasian Markets with Private Information
We incorporate multiagent, principal-agent theory into general equilibrium analysis. The traded commodities are multiagent contracts that include a description of the individual's job, effort level, and state-contingent consumption. These contracts are club goods. The competitive equilibrium and the Pareto program are formulated. The contracts are identified with firms, so the market determines which firms exist and who is assigned to which firm …
Evaluation of financial liberalization
Supplier relationships and small business use of trade credit
Consumption Insurance
The hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low-income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems. In many contexts, idiosyncratic risks are high, so credit/insurance arrangements could be beneficial. Statistical tests reveal that households in southern India take advantage of these possibilities; villages in Cote d'Ivoire and countries in Thailand do not do as well. The paper includes an empirical description …
Risk and Insurance in Village India
The objective of the Institute for Policy Reform is to enhance the foundation for broad based economic growth in developing countries.Through its research, education and training activities the Institute encourages active participation in the dialogue on policy reform, focusing on changes that stimulate and sustain economic development.At the core of these activities is the search for creative ideas that can be used to design constitutional, inst…
The Medieval Village Economy
1Introduction11.1Motivation and Outline1.2Historical BackgroundCh. 2Uncertainty and Landholding Patterns202.1Statistics on Crop Yields2.2Risk-Allocation in an Arrow-Debreu Model with Cross-Household Diversity2.3Division of Land Types as an Ex Ante Solution to the Risk-Allocation Problem2.4Spatial Division as an Ex Ante Solution with Costs of Fragmentation2.5Multiple Crops and the Diet2.6Risk Allocation with Multiple Goods and Preferences Aggregat…
Currency and Credit in a Private Information Economy
In an environment with private information, spatial separation, and limited communication, a currency-like object and more standard named credits can be distinguished. The credit objects can be used among agents in an enduring relationship, that is, among agents with known trading histories, whereas the currency-like object must be used among relative strangers. In this environment, collectively determined Pareto-optimal rules make the level of t…
Models as Economies
Journal Article Models as Economies Get access Robert M. Townsend Robert M. Townsend University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 390, 1 April 1988, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233300 Published: 01 April 1988
Forecasting the Forecasts of Others
This paper explores the formulation and analysis of linear equilibrium models of investment in which learning is perpetual and informationally decentralized firms need never share the same beliefs concerning time series relevant to their decisions. Recursive, Kalman filtering techniques are shown to be applicable in an illustrative, hierarchical information structure, and a nonlinear technique of undetermined coefficients is shown to be applicabl…
Optimal Multiperiod Contracts and the Gain from Enduring Relationships under Private Information
Informational asymmetries can play a key role in explaining the existence and nature of multiperiod contracts. In an illustrative risk-sharing model even relatively short (two-period) contracts can be mutually beneficial if there is private information, though one-period contracts suffice otherwise. Further, contracts which are Pareto optimal relative to the environment and the information structure are defined and partially characterized. An exa…
Optimal contracts and competitive markets with costly state verification
Using Repayment Data to Test across Models of Joint Liability Lending
Theories rationalising joint liability lending are rich in implications for repayment rates. We exploit this fact to test four diverse models. We show that the models' repayment implications do not always coincide. For example, higher correlation of output and borrowers' ability to act cooperatively can raise or lower repayment, depending on the model. Data from Thai borrowing groups suggest that repayment is affected negatively by the joint liab…
Consumption Insurance
The hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low-income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems. In many contexts, idiosyncratic risks are high, so credit/insurance arrangements could be beneficial. Statistical tests reveal that households in southern India take advantage of these possibilities; villages in Cote d'Ivoire and countries in Thailand do not do as well. The paper includes an empirical description …
Distinguishing Limited Liability from Moral Hazard in a Model of Entrepreneurship
We present and estimate a model in which the choice between entrepreneurship and wage work may be influenced by financial market imperfections. The model allows for limited liability, moral hazard, and a combination of both constraints. The paper uses structural techniques to estimate the model and identify the source of financial market imperfections using data from rural and semiurban households in Thailand. Structural, nonparametric, and reduc…
Evaluation of financial liberalization
Forecasting the Forecasts of Others
This paper explores the formulation and analysis of linear equilibrium models of investment in which learning is perpetual and informationally decentralized firms need never share the same beliefs concerning time series relevant to their decisions. Recursive, Kalman filtering techniques are shown to be applicable in an illustrative, hierarchical information structure, and a nonlinear technique of undetermined coefficients is shown to be applicabl…
Optimal Multiperiod Contracts and the Gain from Enduring Relationships under Private Information
Informational asymmetries can play a key role in explaining the existence and nature of multiperiod contracts. In an illustrative risk-sharing model even relatively short (two-period) contracts can be mutually beneficial if there is private information, though one-period contracts suffice otherwise. Further, contracts which are Pareto optimal relative to the environment and the information structure are defined and partially characterized. An exa…
Town Meeting as a Communication Event
Town meeting deliberation and decision making form a communicative event, the act sequence of which ensures that participants enact a democratic process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 1999 to 2000, documents, interviews, and videotapes and transcripts of meetings, I analyze the Amherst, Massachusetts town meeting. Performances of rhetorical interactions, over time, develop norms for discourse that participants use to make sense of and ev…
Models as Economies
Journal Article Models as Economies Get access Robert M. Townsend Robert M. Townsend University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 390, 1 April 1988, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233300 Published: 01 April 1988
Dynamic Bank Expansion
We propose a model with local spatial markets and heterogeneous agents to understand and evaluate the geographic expansion of bank branches after banking deregulation in Thailand. The model features heterogeneity in financial frictions across regions, with the costs of accessing credit and deposits depending on the distance from the nearest branch. Disciplined by micro estimates of the effects of branch openings, the model reproduces salient regi…
Curbing Shocks to Corporate Liquidity
Using data on liquidity shortfalls generated by the fraud and failure of a cash-in-transit firm, we demonstrate effects on firms’ trade credit usage. We find that firms manage liquidity shortages by increasing the amount of credit drawn from suppliers and decreasing the amount issued to customers. The compounded trade credit adjustments are on average of similar magnitude as corresponding adjustments in cash holdings, suggesting that trade credit…
Village and Larger Economies
I have spent close to 20 years cataloging transactions between households in Thai villages, along with a research team. Just this past summer, we documented a number of ways in which even relatively poor villages have money markets not dissimilar in some ways from New York financial markets, with borrowing and repayment passing along links in credit chains. In another project, we have been looking at month-by-month school attendance, grade level …
Firms as Clubs in Walrasian Markets with Private Information
We incorporate multiagent, principal-agent theory into general equilibrium analysis. The traded commodities are multiagent contracts that include a description of the individual's job, effort level, and state-contingent consumption. These contracts are club goods. The competitive equilibrium and the Pareto program are formulated. The contracts are identified with firms, so the market determines which firms exist and who is assigned to which firm …
Supplier relationships and small business use of trade credit
Currency and Credit in a Private Information Economy
In an environment with private information, spatial separation, and limited communication, a currency-like object and more standard named credits can be distinguished. The credit objects can be used among agents in an enduring relationship, that is, among agents with known trading histories, whereas the currency-like object must be used among relative strangers. In this environment, collectively determined Pareto-optimal rules make the level of t…
Optimal contracts and competitive markets with costly state verification
Optimal Multiperiod Contracts and the Gain from Enduring Relationships under Private Information
Informational asymmetries can play a key role in explaining the existence and nature of multiperiod contracts. In an illustrative risk-sharing model even relatively short (two-period) contracts can be mutually beneficial if there is private information, though one-period contracts suffice otherwise. Further, contracts which are Pareto optimal relative to the environment and the information structure are defined and partially characterized. An exa…
Forecasting the Forecasts of Others
This paper explores the formulation and analysis of linear equilibrium models of investment in which learning is perpetual and informationally decentralized firms need never share the same beliefs concerning time series relevant to their decisions. Recursive, Kalman filtering techniques are shown to be applicable in an illustrative, hierarchical information structure, and a nonlinear technique of undetermined coefficients is shown to be applicabl…
Models as Economies
Journal Article Models as Economies Get access Robert M. Townsend Robert M. Townsend University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 98, Issue 390, 1 April 1988, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233300 Published: 01 April 1988
Currency and Credit in a Private Information Economy
In an environment with private information, spatial separation, and limited communication, a currency-like object and more standard named credits can be distinguished. The credit objects can be used among agents in an enduring relationship, that is, among agents with known trading histories, whereas the currency-like object must be used among relative strangers. In this environment, collectively determined Pareto-optimal rules make the level of t…
Risk and Insurance in Village India
The objective of the Institute for Policy Reform is to enhance the foundation for broad based economic growth in developing countries.Through its research, education and training activities the Institute encourages active participation in the dialogue on policy reform, focusing on changes that stimulate and sustain economic development.At the core of these activities is the search for creative ideas that can be used to design constitutional, inst…
The Medieval Village Economy
1Introduction11.1Motivation and Outline1.2Historical BackgroundCh. 2Uncertainty and Landholding Patterns202.1Statistics on Crop Yields2.2Risk-Allocation in an Arrow-Debreu Model with Cross-Household Diversity2.3Division of Land Types as an Ex Ante Solution to the Risk-Allocation Problem2.4Spatial Division as an Ex Ante Solution with Costs of Fragmentation2.5Multiple Crops and the Diet2.6Risk Allocation with Multiple Goods and Preferences Aggregat…
Consumption Insurance
The hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low-income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems. In many contexts, idiosyncratic risks are high, so credit/insurance arrangements could be beneficial. Statistical tests reveal that households in southern India take advantage of these possibilities; villages in Cote d'Ivoire and countries in Thailand do not do as well. The paper includes an empirical description …
Evaluation of financial liberalization
Supplier relationships and small business use of trade credit
Distinguishing Limited Liability from Moral Hazard in a Model of Entrepreneurship
We present and estimate a model in which the choice between entrepreneurship and wage work may be influenced by financial market imperfections. The model allows for limited liability, moral hazard, and a combination of both constraints. The paper uses structural techniques to estimate the model and identify the source of financial market imperfections using data from rural and semiurban households in Thailand. Structural, nonparametric, and reduc…
Firms as Clubs in Walrasian Markets with Private Information
We incorporate multiagent, principal-agent theory into general equilibrium analysis. The traded commodities are multiagent contracts that include a description of the individual's job, effort level, and state-contingent consumption. These contracts are club goods. The competitive equilibrium and the Pareto program are formulated. The contracts are identified with firms, so the market determines which firms exist and who is assigned to which firm …
Using Repayment Data to Test across Models of Joint Liability Lending
Theories rationalising joint liability lending are rich in implications for repayment rates. We exploit this fact to test four diverse models. We show that the models' repayment implications do not always coincide. For example, higher correlation of output and borrowers' ability to act cooperatively can raise or lower repayment, depending on the model. Data from Thai borrowing groups suggest that repayment is affected negatively by the joint liab…
Patterns of Rainfall Insurance Participation in Rural India
Take-up of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India decreases with basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations, increases with household wealth, and decreases with binding credit constraints. These results are consistent with the predictions of a simple neoclassical model with borrowing constraints. Other patterns are less consistent with the benchmark model. For example, participation…
Town Meeting as a Communication Event
Town meeting deliberation and decision making form a communicative event, the act sequence of which ensures that participants enact a democratic process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 1999 to 2000, documents, interviews, and videotapes and transcripts of meetings, I analyze the Amherst, Massachusetts town meeting. Performances of rhetorical interactions, over time, develop norms for discourse that participants use to make sense of and ev…
Measuring the return on household enterprise
Village and Larger Economies
I have spent close to 20 years cataloging transactions between households in Thai villages, along with a research team. Just this past summer, we documented a number of ways in which even relatively poor villages have money markets not dissimilar in some ways from New York financial markets, with borrowing and repayment passing along links in credit chains. In another project, we have been looking at month-by-month school attendance, grade level …
A Market-Based Solution for Fire Sales and Other Pecuniary Externalities
We show how bundling, exclusivity and additional markets internalize fire sale and other pecuniary externalities. Ex ante competition can achieve a constrained efficient allocation. The solution can be put rather simply: create segregated market exchanges which specify prices in advance and price the right to trade in these markets so that participant types pay, or are compensated, consistent with the market exchange they choose and that type's e…
Curbing Shocks to Corporate Liquidity
Using data on liquidity shortfalls generated by the fraud and failure of a cash-in-transit firm, we demonstrate effects on firms’ trade credit usage. We find that firms manage liquidity shortages by increasing the amount of credit drawn from suppliers and decreasing the amount issued to customers. The compounded trade credit adjustments are on average of similar magnitude as corresponding adjustments in cash holdings, suggesting that trade credit…
‘Eligible to be heard’ in transportation planning
Planners often use the phrase ‘hard-to-reach’ to describe youth, people of color, and people with low incomes, people from whom they need information but are unsuccessful in reaching. Consideration of cultural premises for communicating can help explain why some people are ‘under-heard’ rather than ‘hard-to-reach.’ This study uses cultural discourse analysis to study under-represented community group deliberations about transportation, convened t…
An Enduring System of Local Deliberative Democracy
This essay examines the legal framework for local deliberative democracy in Massachusetts, within the legislature known as “town meeting.” We review the trajectory of this system of local government allowing direct exercise of citizen power via deliberative governance. We focus on the current framework of state and local laws that were created to support and direct local deliberative systems in Massachusetts with greater attention to functional e…
Dynamic Bank Expansion
We propose a model with local spatial markets and heterogeneous agents to understand and evaluate the geographic expansion of bank branches after banking deregulation in Thailand. The model features heterogeneity in financial frictions across regions, with the costs of accessing credit and deposits depending on the distance from the nearest branch. Disciplined by micro estimates of the effects of branch openings, the model reproduces salient regi…
New England Town Meeting and the Cultivation of Deliberative Play
Participants of New England town meeting must follow protocols to participate in this direct democratic process. Over the past 200 years, the protocols have been enacted and adapted by participants in small towns across the region. Within annual meetings, one can find small breaches that could be interpreted as playful acts. In this paper, we use the comic frame as a theoretical lens to interpret instances of such play within the rhetorical delib…
Inequality and Globalization
A unicorn and an echo
How do American higher-education leaders handle a problem that defies their prior experience? Academic leaders in the U.S. are handling contemporary struggles with varying approaches. Most are keep
Economics (19 obras) · Business (8 obras) · Microeconomics (8 obras) · Political science (8 obras) · Computer Science (7 obras) · Economic theories and models (7 obras) · Finance (7 obras) · Sociology (7 obras) · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion (6 obras) · Finance (5 obras)