This study first examines the evolution of gender wage gap in Thailand, using cross-sectional data from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) for 1985–2017. We find that education, occupation, and industry significantly contribute to gender wage gap convergence in Thailand. Furthermore, for females, the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers has increased over time, while for males, the changes are relatively small. Thereafter, we examine the gender wage gap associated with marriage and parental status, using panel data from the Socio-Economic Survey (SES) for 2005– 2012, and find wage penalty for both motherhood and fatherhood in Thailand.

This study measures educational assortative mating in Thailand and its relationship with income inequality using national labor force survey data from 1985-2016. Since the 1990s, Thailand shows a trend of decreasing educational homogamy, but there is evidence of continuing educational hypergamy in Thai households. Using the semiparametric decomposition method of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996), the study finds that educational assortative mating has affected changes in household income inequality over time. Furthermore, there exists a negative relationship between income inequality and marital sorting with same education, which contradicts evidence found in developed countries.

This study investigates the labour supply behaviour of married Thai women with reference to their own and their spouse’s wages. By utilising data of the national Labour Force Survey in Thailand from 1985 to 2016, the wage imputation technique and the instrumental variables approach are applied to correct sample selection and to alleviate endogeneity, common issues that cause bias in estimating female labour supply. By controlling for spousal education and number of children, the main findings indicate an inverse relationship between married women’s labour supply and wages, contrary to the results found in most developed countries. The estimated own wage elasticity ranges from -1.70 to -2.40 and cross elasticity ranges from -0.16 to -0.17, indicating that the impact of own wage on labour supplied is much larger than spouse’s wage. The results from disaggregation classified according to different socioeconomic backgrounds also show the negative elasticities between own and spouses’ wage across all subgroups, except for those with university degrees and higher income.

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.

In this paper, we develop a model of wage dynamics and employment mobility with unrestricted interactions between worker and firm unobserved characteristics in both wages and employment mobility. We adopt the finite mixture approach of Bonhomme et al. (2017). The model is estimated on Danish matched employer-employee data for the period 1985-2013. The estimation includes gender, education, age, tenure and time controls. We find significant sorting on wages and it is stable over the period. Sorting is established early in careers, increasing during the first decade after which it declines steadily. Job-to-job mobility displays a “mean-reverting” pattern that maintains correlations between worker and firm types to a stationary level. Counterfactuals demonstrate that sorting is primarily driven by two channels: First, a “preference” channel whereby higher wage workers are more likely to accept jobs in higher wage firms. Second, a job finding channel where the job destination distribution out of non-employment is stochastically increasing in the wage type of the worker.

This paper studies the impact of immigration on wages, internal migration and welfare. Using U.S. Census data, I estimate a spatial equilibrium model where labor differs by skill level, gender and nativity. Workers are heterogeneous in city preferences. Cities vary in productivity levels, housing prices and amenities. I use the estimated model to assess the distributional consequences of several immigration policies. The results show that a skill selective immigration policy leads to welfare gains for low skill workers, but welfare losses for high skill workers. The negative impacts are more substantial among the incumbent high skill immigrants. Internal migration mitigates the initial negative impacts, particularity in cities where high skill workers are relatively mobile. However, the negative impacts on some workers intensify. This is because an out-migration of workers of a given type may raise the local wages for workers of that type, while reducing the local wages of workers with complementary characteristics. Overall, there are substantial variations in the welfare effects of immigration across and within cities. Further, I also use the model to assess a non-selective immigration policy and deportation of unauthorized immigrants in specific areas.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 study uses a firm-level dataset to examine the impacts of taxation on multinationals’ decisions to set up new foreign subsidiaries in developing ASEAN countries. It finds that taxes play a critical role in MNEs’ location choice decision, with tax incentives being instrumental for maintaining location choice probabilities associated with each host country. The findings also indicate important heterogeneity in the tax responsiveness. First, the tax sensitivity for high-tech firms is significantly lower than that for low-tech firms. Second, having a prior presence in the respective host country is associated with substantially lower tax responsiveness. Finally, in accordance with international tax-avoidance considerations, the tax responsiveness is significantly diminished for affiliates with a connection to tax-haven countries. These provide important policy implications for developing-country governments that consider employing tax incentives to attract MNEs.

This study examines the influence of taxation on FDI using data from South-East Asia. It employs the quantile regression approach with fixed effects that provides a comprehensive view of the tax sensitivity across the FDI distribution. Estimates confirm the significantly negative impact of the bilateral effective average tax rate but its effect is heterogeneous across the distribution. This stresses the importance of understanding the effect of taxation across the distribution rather than only at the mean. Also, the economic significance of the tax is relatively smaller than that of other fundamental factors such as labor quality and governance.

This paper studies the impacts of Thailand’s 2011-2012 first-car tax rebate scheme on household debt using the account-level loan data from National Credit Bureau. While the literature mostly concentrates on the macroeconomic effects of such stimulus, this study focuses on the effects on individuals who borrow to finance their durable-goods purchases. We show that the program led to higher delinquency on loans and crowded out other loan originations. Our findings are consistent with the demand-shifting mechanism—the rebates encouraged participants to purchase their cars very prematurely. The results were more adverse for passenger car buyers than for truck buyers. We also find local spillover effects of the program on non-auto loans and on individuals not participating in the program.

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.

The Asian financial crisis in 1997 has an impact on Thailand’s productivity both in the short run and in the long run. The post-crisis productivity growth rate dropped to merely 1% per year in comparison to the pre-crisis level at 2% per year. Thus, a better understanding about the factors determining Thailand’s aggregate productivity is a key to raising Thailand’s output in the long run. Recent literature has identified resource misallocation as an important factor to explain the difference in the productivity levels between developed and developing economies. This paper uses the plant-level data to estimate the allocative efficiency and to identify the source of resource misallocation in the Thai manufacturing sector. The results suggest that the size-dependent policies could contribute to the factor misallocation and that market concentration, foreign investment, and financial deepening could help alleviate the misallocation problem at the sector level. However, R&D activities intensifies resource misallocation that calls for well-defined policies to promote knowledge spillover within industry and to reduce the frontier-laggard gap. Dynamic resource reallocation helps shore up TFP growth over the business cycle that emphasizing a set of policy to reinforce the mechanism of creative destruction.