This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of Thai agriculture, the sector that currently employs about one third of the country’s labor force. We first draw out key stylized facts on our farms, farmers and farming from various granular farmer’s administrative data sets that allow us to observe what has happened at the plot, labor and household levels over the past decade, and cover more than 90% of farmers nationwide. We then use a stochastic frontier analysis to identify key drivers of household’s agricultural productivity, and project the potential productivity impacts from the four key driving factors: climate change, aging, irrigation and technology for every tambon nationwide. A meta-analysis is then used to illustrate the landscape of technological development throughout the rice value chain in Thailand. Finally, we use lab in the field experiments to understand behavioral insights that underly farmer’s incentives particularly in the context of technological adoption. Our results shed some lights on how to design, prioritize and implement policies to ensure that our farmers stay competitive, resilient and sustainable.

ประเด็นเรื่องความเหลื่อมล้ำของประเทศไทยนั้นมักจะได้รับความสนใจอยู่เสมอ  แม้ตัวเลขทางการจะแสดงว่าความเหลื่อมล้ำด้านรายได้ของไทยมีแนวโน้มลดลงในช่วงสามทศวรรษที่ผ่านมาก่อนวิกฤตโรคระบาดโควิด-19  แต่มักจะถูกโต้แย้งว่าความเหลื่อมล้ำของไทย โดยเฉพาะด้านความมั่งคั่ง นั้นอยู่ในระดับสูงมาก  บทความนี้นำเสนอภาพใหญ่ของเรื่องความเหลื่อมล้ำว่ามีหลากหลายมิติ และในแต่ละมิตินั้น มีความสัมพันธ์กันอย่างไร  โดยเริ่มด้วยการนำเสนอกรอบความคิดว่าความเหลื่อมล้ำทางโอกาสตั้งแต่วัยเด็กนั้นส่งผลเป็นความเหลื่อมล้ำทางเศรษฐกิจ ไม่ว่าจะเป็นมิติด้านรายได้หรือการบริโภค ซึ่งส่งผลต่อไปเป็นความเหลื่อมล้ำด้านความมั่งคั่ง  ส่วนต่อมา ทบทวนบทบาทของนโยบายต่าง ๆ ที่เกี่ยวข้อง ทั้งนโยบายที่มุ่งบรรเทาปัญหาเฉพาะหน้าและนโยบายเพื่อแก้ปัญหาเชิงโครงสร้าง  และส่วนสุดท้ายนำเสนอหลักฐานเชิงประจักษ์ในมิติต่าง ๆ ของความเหลื่อมล้ำในประเทศไทย โดยรวมถึงมิติการศึกษา สุขภาพ การเข้าถึงทรัพยากรและบริการขั้นพื้นฐาน ตลาดแรงงาน ภาคเกษตร ภาคธุรกิจ การบริโภค และความมั่งคั่ง

This paper studies the effects of SME tax incentives on firm behaviors. We use firm-level panel data of all registered firms in Thailand to analyze the effects of a large reduction in corporate income tax rates for SMEs in 2011. First, we find that firms responded strongly to the SME tax incentive as indicated by a sharp bunching of firms just below the threshold after the incentive was introduced. The responses were concentrated among firms with positive EBIT, implying a financial motive for firms to remain small. Second, the bunching was prominent for stand-alone firms, where we observe slower revenue growth for those below the threshold. Third, we do not observe bunching for corporate-group firms, but we find evidence of tax-motivated profit shifting among them instead, especially among firms in small groups with weak corporate governance. Our analysis suggests that transfer pricing was likely a primary channel. Finally, despite the unintended consequences, we find that the incentive significantly raised the probability of firm’s survival and encouraged new firm registration, as the policy intended.

We use administrative data of all registered firms in Thailand, both public and private, to study the relationships between common ownership, market power, and firms’ export behaviors. Our results suggest that firms in ownership networks tend to have higher market power as measured by markup. In addition, markup is negatively associated with a firm’s propensity to export, its likelihood of product upgrade, and the chance of survival in foreign markets. Our findings have policy implications on antitrust regulations and competitiveness policies, especially in export-oriented economies dominated by powerful business conglomerates.

This paper investigates the impact of exposure to a family business and participating in a family business on individuals decision to start a business (self-employed and small business) and their likelihood of survival. We find that individuals who have a family member doing business are more likely to start their own business. However, only individuals who have actually worked in the family-owned business are more likely to survive longer. This paper demonstrates that the higher the number of hours they worked in a family business, the higher the probability of survival. The impact remains significant even if the sample includes only individuals who are the spouses of business owners. The impact of prior experience from helping a family business depreciates over a short period of time. This result suggests that entrepreneurial skills can be learnt from an apprenticeship in small businesses.

This paper conducts in-depth profiling of players and interlinkages in the Thai financial system based on sectoral balance sheet data and disaggregated supervisory data on banks and mutual funds. Several aspects of Thailand’s financial landscape have been documented. We find that financial interconnectedness has risen and become more complex, with the financial landscape increasingly tilted toward non-bank intermediaries. Network topology suggests a segmented landscape, with the presence of a core cluster where key players including households, firms, large domestic banks, and mutual funds of large banks’ asset management arms are located, indicating their tight interconnections. Leveraging on entity-level balance sheet profiles, we develop a stress-testing framework that is based on a network model of financial contagion. Two types of shocks are studied. For industry shocks, we find that losses generally propagate via the liability and ownership channel and the reverse liquidity channel. But when the losses are large enough, the fire-sale effects dominate. For bank reputational shocks, we simulate a loss of confidence in major banks via deposit withdrawal and fund redemption. While the overall losses are much smaller than those of industry shocks, these risks cannot be ignored since the mutual fund industry stands to suffer and panic selling could amplify the losses.

Bank runs are a natural phenomenon for financial institutions that issue fixed value liabilities (e.g. money) that are backed by assets with uncertain value. I analyze Iron Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that issues stablecoin (a token with fixed nominal exchange rate: IRON) liabilities in exchange for a basket of other tokens (including a token issued by the protocol itself: TITAN). A combination of mathematical algorithms and incentive to arbitrage is used to maintain the exchange rate peg, but a shock to the protocol sent it into a downward spiral – much like a bank run. The incentives built into the protocol to defend the peg exacerbated its unravelling, raising the challenge of how DeFi protocols can address this vulnerability while remaining decentralized.

REIT IPOs in Thailand are less underpriced than stock IPOs (2.45% compared to 23.0%), which is a common finding across many international markets (Chan, Chen and Wang, 2013). One of the most common explanations for IPO underpricing is adverse selection arising from information asymmetry. However, research in IPO tends not to investigate this issue directly due to the difficulty in estimating ex-ante uncertainty. REITs provide a unique research setting because some REITs enjoy income guarantee, which can reduce cash flow uncertainty. We find that REITs with income guarantee are much less underpriced on average, corroborating the linkage between cash flow uncertainty and IPO underpricing. We confirm that REITs with income guarantee tend to have lower systematic risk (measured by CAPM beta) and returns, making the nature of some REITs more debt-like than equity-like.

This study examines the question of how consumer prioritize default across products. We find that about a third of Thai individuals who face default decisions on mortgage and non-mortgage loans choose to default on mortgage loans first. As predicted by theory, their decisions are influenced by relative debt burden and amount of housing equity, consistent with both the ability to pay and the willingness to pay channels. We also find a puzzling result that borrowers who hold older mortgage loans are more likely to default on their mortgages; we hypothesize that this is perhaps related to refinancing.