Thailand’s income inequality has reportedly declined since the mid-1990s. This paper examines possible mechanisms underlying the dynamic patterns of the country’s labor income inequality. Using the Thai labor force survey between 1988 and 2017, we document that the country’s reduction in income inequality is likely driven by the fact the earnings at the bottom part of the distribution have become more similar. The median wage gap between college and non-college workers, however, still gets larger over time. Our key explanation is the changes in education-occupation composition. Recently college graduates are no longer concentrated in high skill jobs. A larger share of secondary educated workers works in low-skill jobs instead of the middle-skill ones. Using panel administrative data from the Thai Social Security Office, we find that wage disparity can also be explained by employment history. The high wage earners earn more since they enter the market, and the gap gets wider as the workers age. Additionally, the top of the group can command higher wages by working at a large firm or switching to a new job. These findings highlight the fact that to tackle the income inequality issue, the country needs to understand the underlying mechanisms behinds its dynamics.

This paper investigates the impact of Thai women’s education on their marriage behavior and fertility. It first uses the data set from the Labor Force Survey to estimate the effect of education on the marriage market. The result from applying the recent doubly robust Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment (IPWRA) indicates that obtaining a university degree decreases the probability of women’s marriage by 14.8%, emphasizing the rise of the “Gold Miss” phenomenon in Thailand. It further examines the effect of education on fertility. By applying both the instrumental variable using the compulsory education reform as an instrument and pseudo-panel approaches to take into account the endogeneity of schooling, the result shows that education causally reduces fertility, which provides a convincing sequential explanation for the dramatic decline in fertility in Thailand.

This study investigates the boomerang phenomenon among adult children in Thailand. We estimate the effect of having children on co-residence between parents and adult children using Socio-Economic Survey panel data. We find that adult children who have moved out tend to move back in with their parents after having children to save time and money on childcare. The presence of young children increases the likelihood of intergenerational co-residence by over 30%. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of boomerang kids in an Asian context, which is distinctive compared with Western countries. The relationship between intergenerational co-residence and the maternal labor supply is also examined using the instrumental variable approach based on the cross-sectional Labor Force Survey, which has data covering over 30 years. Our results show that co-residence increases the female labor supply by 21% and also extends women’s working hours by 10 hours.

We investigate how rainfall shocks, in terms of floods and droughts, affect income, consumption, and coping responses of farming households in Thailand. We draw on a province pseudo-panel, combining household-level information from repeated cross-sectional farm household surveys over the period of 2006-2010 and provincial-based measures of annual rainfall shocks. These rainfall shock variables are constructed from high frequency rainfall time series, identifying the incidence of excessive and deficit rainfall events. We find that crop income falls sharply as a results of rainfall shocks, while there is evidence of income smoothing through asset transactions and off-farm employment in response to excessive rainfall but not deficit rainfall. This suggests that deficit rainfall events are more difficult to insure against as droughts not only reduce crop income but also limit households’ opportunities to smooth income. On average, households seem to be able to smooth their consumption when affected by floods or droughts, although we do see a reduction in spending on luxury and miscellaneous items in case of droughts in order to maintain necessary consumption. Dissaving and asset sales are prevalent strategies for consumption smoothing. Finally, our findings emphasise wealth-differentiated effects of rainfall shocks as landless households seem more vulnerable to rainfall shocks than landholding households due to their limited ability to smooth income and consumption.

National culture may affect the prevalence of connected lending. This study aimed to assess the effects of national culture, especially collectivism, on the need for special connections with banks, which is a measure of connected lending. The researcher obtained national culture data from both Hofstede’s work and the GLOBE project. Using data covering more than 5000 firms in 51 countries, this study found that GLOBE Institutional Collectivism decreases the need for special connections, while Hofstede Collectivism and GLOBE In-Group Collectivism do not. This suggests that the need for special connections with banks is different from the corruption of bank officials.

We develop and simplify spectral analysis of time series. The main focus is on the spectral representation theorem, Bochner’s theorem, and some key results concerning time-invariant linear filters. We then show how to apply these key results to shed some light on various applications including Yule-Slutsky effects, seasonal adjustment and trend estimation. We also show how spectral analysis can indicate appropriateness of certain statistical models when applied with some economic time series.

This paper analyzes inequalities in Thailand over the past three decades and the implications of Covid-19 on existing inequalities. We show that while total income and consumption inequalities in Thailand have been declining, it raises concerns regarding some drivers behind the declining trends. First, the decline in income inequality among the older households is largely driven by private transfers. Given Thailand’s demographic transformation into aging society, this channel is not sustainable. Second, despite the increasing longevity trend, household heads aged 55-69 years old have become inactive in the labor markets over the years. Among active households, the earnings inequality among households who mainly earn from farming activities has risen. However, such increase was masked at the aggregate level because of the higher shares of households working in non-farm sectors and the decline in their earnings inequality. Third, while consumption inequality has fallen similarly to income inequality for all age groups, the low-income households remain highly exposed to income shock. These poor households have much higher shares of essential spending, which are harder to adjust. Finally, while the full effects of Covid-19 on inequality are still unfolding, our evidence shows that in the short-run the poor and the low educated are vulnerable to job and earnings losses.

This paper provides empirical evidence on how the labour market impacts of the covid-19 pandemic vary across workers’ incomes, assets, characteristics and household structures in the UK. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we find that less educated and young workers are most likely to be laid-off. This is particularly the case for females. Moreover, less educated workers tend to have low income and low assets, limiting their ability to maintain consumption in the face of reduced income. This is compounded at the household level by assortative partnering between workers with similar education levels. We analyse the source of these inequalities by relating employment outcomes to factors related occupational and industrial characteristics. We then conduct a quantitative assessment of the likely impact of covid-19 on households’ consumption and find that, because the adverse labour market impacts are concentrated on workers with low income and low assets, 70 percent of households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution cannot maintain their usual expenditure for even one week. Finally, we consider the effectiveness and distributional implications of two different policy interventions: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme in the UK and Economic Impact Payments in the US. Our findings suggest that both policies can alleviate the increase in consumption inequality that would have otherwise arisen during the pandemic. In the short term, the US-style one-off payment is most effective at providing affected households with the means to smooth consumption. However, the CJRS provides better insurance against prolonged disruption as the program provides continuous income support.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted working life in many ways, the negative consequences of which may be distributed unevenly under lockdown regulations. In this paper, we construct a new set of pandemic-related indices from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) using factor analysis. The indices capture two key dimensions of job task requirements: (i) the extent to which jobs can be adaptable to work from home; and (ii) the degree of infection risk at workplace. The interaction of these two dimensions help identify which groups of workers are more vulnerable to income losses, and which groups of occupations pose more risk to public health. This information is crucial for both designing appropriate supporting programs and finding a strategy to reopen the economy while controlling the spread of the virus. In our application, we map the indices to the labor force survey of a developing country, Thailand, to analyze these new labor market risks. We document differences in job characteristics across income groups, at both individual and household levels. First, low income individuals tend to work in occupations that require less physical interaction (lower risk of infection) but are less adaptable to work from home (higher risk of income/job loss) than high income people. Second, the positive occupational sorting among low-income couples amplifies these differences at the household level. Consequently, low-income families tend to face a disproportionately larger risk of income/job loss from lockdown measures. In addition, the different exposure to infection and income risks between income groups can play an important role in shaping up the timing and optimal strategies to unlock the economy.

This paper builds on a life cycle model of occupational choices and financial frictions to understand the main channel through which demography and inequality influence the economy. Based on household data from Thailand, younger cohorts are likely to be workers and older cohorts are likely to be entrepreneurs due to age-dependent skills and asset accumulation. Under the new normal faced by the Thai economy as well as others, aging population can lower overall total factor productivity and increase inequality. An increase in equilibrium wage due to shortage of labor supply drives mediocre entrepreneurs to become self-employed – a low-income and low-productivity occupation – and worsens total factor productivity and hence inequality. Moreover, a decline in world interest rates associated with global aging population will exacerbate this negative effect. Reducing financial frictions or alleviating a borrowing constraint of talented entrepreneurs can mitigate this effect while extending retirement age will only improve output per capita while total factor productivity and inequality worsen.

The objective of the paper is to study the effects of semantic similarity of the Bank of Thailand’s press releases on volatility of financial markets in Thailand from 2010-2018. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) is employed to construct the semantic similarity from 72 press releases. The semantic similarity represents the public signal that the central bank delivers to the public in the framework of a Keynesian beauty contest game.

The semantic similarity of MPC press releases significantly reduce the volatility in 1-month, 3-month, 10-year and 15-year government debt securities. Findings imply that relatively similar language in the MPC press releases reduces the volatility in short-term and long-term bonds. Effects of semantic similarity matter most in the volatility of 10-year bond yield. However, effects of semantic similarity are insignificant in both equity and foreign exchange markets.

Following Engel (2016) and Valchev (2015), this paper documents the relationship between interest rate differentials and differential returns on domestic and foreign bonds over time horizon using a broader data sample. I find that countries with higher contemporaneous interest rates earn excess positive bond returns initially in accordance with previous UIP literature. However, the sign of excess returns reverses in the medium run. Higher contemporaneous interest rates predict negative excess returns. Eventually, interest differentials have no excess return predictability. I argue that behavioral bubbles are natural and successful candidates in generating exchange rate dynamics observed in the data. In particular, I propose that investors rely not only on fundamentals (interest differentials) but also extrapolate past exchange rates when forming expectations. The proposed extrapolative model is consistent with both excess return patterns and survey evidence in the data.

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.

Despite rapid growth in e-commerce, there has been little systematic research examining the impact of online commerce adoption on the entrepreneurs in ASEAN. Using a unique survey data of around 7,000 merchants on Shopee in Thailand, this paper seeks to fill that gap through a mix of econometric and trade connectivity analyses. We found that e-commerce adoption is associated with improvement in household incomes for the sellers. The benefits come from two different channels. First, e-commerce empowers existing SMEs by significantly boosting their revenue, efficiency, and profit growth. The improvement in profitability seems to go beyond a one-off gain as going online seems to also result in stronger profit growth rates. Second, our trade connectivity analysis illustrates how e-commerce allows merchants, especially those in the poorer regions, discover new market opportunity outside their own regions. In addition, e-commerce allows people of various employment status including full-time employees, homemakers, students, etc. to earn additional income, while maintaining other responsibilities.

This study explores the value investing strategy coupling with quality metrics for the U.S. insurance industry. It uses apparent measures of insurance company efficiency such as loss ratio, expense ratio, combined ratio, and investment yield to construct portfolios. There are evidences of value premium as measured by PB and PE ratios. It is not clear that the quality metrics can give superior returns for investors. The anomalies can partially be explained by Fama-French five-factor model (FF5)’s market factor, value factor and profitability factor. The study also proposes using a new five-factor model that changes the profitability (quality) factor slightly from the Fama-French five-factor model. The adjusted FF5 “local” using insurance local factors do not improve the ability to explain the portfolios’ returns.

This study explores the strategy of value investing, specifically for the insurance industry in Thailand. It employs multiple measures of “value,” suitable for insurance companies, such as the price-to-earning (PE), price-to-book (PB), and cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE). Value premium exists in the Thai insurance industry. Most of the value portfolios constructed from these measures significantly outperform the market, even when adjusting for price volatility and portfolio’s ß . The cumulative returns are also higher for the value stocks, when compared to the growth stocks, and the Thai stock market. Constructing a value portfolio, using the PE ratio, results in the highest returns and are far better than PB and CAPE. The value anomaly cannot be fully explained by either the capital asset pricing model or the Fama-French 3 factor models.

This paper explores three monetary and financial issues of retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the Thai context. The first insight shows that opportunities in the digital age may arise for Thai citizens and businesses to reap the benefits of a more efficient form of public money and financial innovation. It is possible for Thai citizens to quickly adopt unremunerated CBDC for transactional use within a decade. Second, we point out that there are several ways to utilize retail CBDC for enhancing monetary policy effectiveness , namely, through the bank rate channel and the introduction of new monetary policy tools. Nevertheless, monetary policy should not be the first and foremost objective for the central bank to issue CBDC as there are other factors to consider. These included impacts on the central bank balance sheet and monetary operations, especially for remunerated CBDC. Disintermediation and liquidity risks for Thai financial institutions are also key concerns, which are discussed in the third part. We assess that the risks to the banking sector are low in normal periods, but the well-designed CBDC features are necessary to prevent mounting liquidity risks in distressed periods.

Since the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis during 2007-2008, financial stability (FS) has become top priority for central banks around the world. The conduct of monetary policy (MP) sees no exception. By leveraging on the existing literature, we propose a systematic approach to incorporate FS considerations into MP framework. This starts with calculating a financial cycle (FC) which is a measure of financial imbalances and a predictor of financial crises. We then look at an FS dashboard which consolidates pockets of risks facing the financial sector, and show how it may be used in FS surveillance. Next, we discuss the concept of model development and introduce an example of a model platform to facilitate MP formulation. Nevertheless, when implementing MP to address FS risks, policymakers encounter an inter-temporal trade-off between financial and price stability. A key challenge towards MP decision-making is, therefore, to strike a balance between both mandates by designing the appropriate policy mix between monetary and macroprudential policies. As a demonstration of our approach, we discuss, in each section, an on-going attempt at the Bank of Thailand to systematically incorporate FS into flexible inflation targeting.

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.

This paper uses loan-level data from Thailand’s National Credit Bureau to study household debt over the life cycle of borrowers. The wide coverage and the granularity of the data allow us to decompose the aggregate, commonly-used debt per capita and delinquency rate into components that unveil the extensive and intensive margins of household indebtedness. This decomposition allows us to analyze debt holding, debt portfolio, and delinquency for each age and cohort. We find the striking inverted-U life cycle patterns of indebtedness as predicted by economic theories. However, peaks are reached at different ages for different loan products and different lenders. We also find that debt has expanded over time for all age groups. In particular, the younger cohorts seem to originate debt earlier in their lives than the older generations. Meanwhile, older borrowers remain indebted well past their retirement age. Finally, we find a downward pattern of delinquency over the life cycle. Our findings have important policy implications on financial access and distress of households as well as economic development and financial stability of the economy.

This paper explores promises of satellite technology in creating high-quality agricultural risk information necessary for unlocking market inefficiencies that have precluded sustainable development of insurance markets and overall risk management in agricultural sector, where uninsured risk remains a leading impediment of economic development. Using pixel-level, high resolution, high frequency and longitudinal satellite data together with a combination of geographical information system (GIS) data, administrative and household-level agricultural data, this paper answers three questions: (1) Can satellite data be used to generate high-quality risk information for Thai rice farmers? (2) How might the satellite-based risk information be used to crowd in sustainable markets for agricultural finance? And (3) What are potential economic impacts of having high quality agricultural data on farmers, agricultural banks and government? After illuminating the potential values of investing in high-quality agricultural data, this paper also discusses key challenges and ways forward in bringing this research into real action to enhance financial stability of farmers, financial system and government.

Digital technology is changing the way we transact and pay each other, but cash usage remains dominant in many countries. In Thailand, it remains a question whether and to what extent electronic payments (e-payment) can replace cash. What is the role of a central bank amid challenges and opportunities at this crossroads? The paper explores global trends in cash and e-payment and outlines Thailand’s existing retail payment landscape. Both physical and IT/ICT infrastructure are assessed at micro-level with regard to Thailand’s readiness to move away from cash. However, given coexistence of cash and e-payment at present, we explore ways in which efficiency of cash management process can be improved. Data on cash distribution by geographical area are utilized to illustrate usage of Thai consumers and identify costs and inefficiency associated with cash management. On the other hand, adoption of e-payment can play a critical role in moving toward a less-cash society, if not a cashless one. The paper highlights the latest data on e-payment behavior in Thailand, especially PromptPay transactions as well as mobile/internet transactions after the transfer fee reduction in March 2018.

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.

This paper uses a panel of personal income tax return data for the population of Thai tax filers to examine how individuals respond to tax subsidy for long-term savings. We utilize the 2013 tax reform that lowered the price subsidy for long-term savings in order to obtain causal identification. Our difference-in-difference analysis illustrates that there is a considerable heterogeneity in the individual responses to the subsidy cut—with middle-income taxpayers responding much greater than their high-income counterparts. Among the middle-income group, we also find that the subsidy reduction has larger effects on decisions of smaller contributors. Finally, we provide some suggestive evidence that taxpayers who are younger, less financially sophisticated and less financially disciplined exhibit stronger responses to the subsidy cut. Our findings shed light on the heterogeneity of individual responses which are crucial for policymakers who consider an incremental change in the existing tax incentive scheme.

This study uses firm-level data from ASEAN5 to examine whether there are systemic differences in how reported profit is taxed between foreign multinational and comparable local firms. Using propensity score matching, it finds that the effective tax rate (ETR: tax expense divided by pre-tax profit) of foreign MNEs is 1.8 percentage point lower than that of local firms. It also shows that the preferential tax treatment is responsible for 95% of the ETR differential. Under the baseline scenario, the associated revenue loss is 2.6% of total corporate income revenue.

E-commerce has gained larger market shares in Thailand over the last decade. Yet there is a paucity of studies on online price behaviour and movement. This project is one of the first attempts to explore this topic in the Thai context. Using web scraping technique to acquire the data on price and product information from major retailers that have both physical and online outlets, this paper summarizes its findings into six stylized facts. In short, online price changes more frequent than its offline counterpart, yet the magnitudes of changes are generally much larger. Further, price heterogeneity exists across stores and product categories. However, pricing strategies of the same store seems to differ between its online and offline outlets.

Unlike standard literature on the social pension policy and children’s outcomes, this paper provides evidence from Thailand that an introduction of small (equivalent to 2-3 days of minimum wage) but universally covered social pension can affect educational choice and work status of children living with eligible pensioners. Such a result seems to be driven by the characteristics of newly eligible pensioners who are not as poor as the pensioners under the targeted program before the reform. Our findings also show differential effects of the social pension by genders of the children and pensioners. In particular, teenage boys living with male pensioners are more likely to enroll in the secondary school compared to children in the control group living with almost eligible seniors, while the results for teenage girls are rather inconclusive.

Digital technology is changing the way we transact and pay each other, but cash usage remains dominant in many countries. In Thailand, it remains a question whether and to what extent electronic payments (e-payment) can replace cash. What is the role of a central bank amid challenges and opportunities at this crossroads? The paper explores global trends in cash and e-payment and outlines Thailand’s existing retail payment landscape. Both physical and IT/ICT infrastructure are assessed at micro-level with regard to Thailand’s readiness to move away from cash. However, given coexistence of cash and e-payment at present, we explore ways in which efficiency of cash management process can be improved. Data on cash distribution by geographical area are utilized to illustrate usage of Thai consumers and identify costs and inefficiency associated with cash management. On the other hand, adoption of e-payment can play a critical role in moving toward a less-cash society, if not a cashless one. The paper highlights the latest data on e-payment behavior in Thailand, especially PromptPay transactions as well as mobile/internet transactions after the transfer fee reduction in March 2018.

This paper uses loan-level data from Thailand’s National Credit Bureau to study household debt over the life cycle of borrowers. The wide coverage and the granularity of the data allow us to decompose the aggregate, commonly-used debt per capita and delinquency rate into components that unveil the extensive and intensive margins of household indebtedness. This decomposition allows us to analyze debt holding, debt portfolio, and delinquency for each age and cohort. We find the striking inverted-U life cycle patterns of indebtedness as predicted by economic theories. However, peaks are reached at different ages for different loan products and different lenders. We also find that debt has expanded over time for all age groups. In particular, the younger cohorts seem to originate debt earlier in their lives than the older generations. Meanwhile, older borrowers remain indebted well past their retirement age. Finally, we find a downward pattern of delinquency over the life cycle. Our findings have important policy implications on financial access and distress of households as well as economic development and financial stability of the economy.

This paper uses loan-level data from the National Credit Bureau to study household debt in Thailand. The wide coverage and the granularity of the data allow us to analyze prevalence, intensity, and distribution of debt and delinquency by loan product, lender, and borrower. We show that there are tremendous heterogeneities in debt and delinquency across these attributes. Overall, credit access in Thailand appears moderate and limited for housing loans. Thais begin to have debt earlier in their lives and hold debt until very old. Household debt is largely concentrated and plagued with high debt intensity and delinquency prevalence, especially among the young working age population, implying a potential increase in the vulnerability of the financial system and prolonged sluggish domestic spending. Our findings have important implications for policy design and targeting.

This paper analyzes macroprudential policy in the form of loan-to-value (LTV) restriction in a bubble-creation economy of Martin and Ventura (forth- coming). We find that implementation of LTV policy may generate multiple equilibria. Moreover, its effectiveness in terms of investment and size of bubbles depends on the degree of financial friction. In high-capital steady state, low (high) financial friction implies that bubbles originally crowd out (in) investment, so that implementation of LTV policy causes bubbles to decrease (remain unchanged) and enhances (reduces) investment. However, in low-capital equilibrium, the policy has ambiguous effects. LTV policy may help to lower the possibility of sunspot equilibria in two aspects: (1) by destabilizing the low-capital steady state and (2) by confining the set of consistent market sentiments in the presence of high financial friction.

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 study analyzes the entire universe of registered firms in Thailand. There are five main findings. First, firm size distribution is smooth, with a majority of firms in the middle of the distribution; the apparent ”missing middle” phenomenon is entirely driven by arbitrary categorization of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Second, the Thai corporate sector is very concentrated; the concentration has also risen over the past decade. Third, larger firms seem to have advantages over smaller firms regarding financing. Fourth, smaller firms tend to disproportionately invest less in fixed assets than larger firms. Finally, firms in the middle of the size distribution exhibit the highest return on asset (ROA) but have low leverage, consistent with the symptom of credit constraints. Large firms, in contrast, seem to have lower ROA but higher debt. Meanwhile, smaller firms seem to have both lower leverage and ROA. Overall, our results suggest that the Thai corporate sector exhibits both inefficient capital allocation and financial vulnerability. The paper has important policy implications on resource allocation in the economy, particularly, regarding appropriate assistance provided to small and medium enterprises.