Essays on the financial system of developing economies

The thesis consists of three chapters, which explore the financial system of rural Thai Villages through the lens of the Townsend Thai Monthly Survey. The first two chapters examine savings behaviour, while the last chapter investigates borrowing. In the first chapter, I apply the estimation technique of Deaton and Paxson (2000) to the monthly version of the Townsend Thai Household Survey and find that individual savings rate decreases with individual age. This result contrasts the flat savings profile found when estimation is conducted at the household level. I further extend the Deaton-Paxson technique to deal with autocorrelation in panel data, and noisy estimates due to small sample size. Applying the appropriate corrections generates the inverse U shape savings rate profile predicted by the life-cycle model.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Sripakdeevong, Parit.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert M. Townsend.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122543

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122543