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Francisco Buera, Enterprise Initiative Collaborator, Awarded Kauffman Foundation Junior Faculty Fellowship

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:08:00 GMT

KANSAS CITY, Mo., May 19 (AScribe Newswire) -- The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today the recipients of the Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowships in Entrepreneurship Research. Five fellowships in the amount of $50,000 each were awarded to tenured or tenure-track junior faculty members whose research has the potential to make significant contributions to the body of literature in entrepreneurship. Each Fellow's university will receive the grant over two years to support the research activities of the Fellow. The Fellowships will be presented at the Allied Social Science Associations' annual meeting in Atlanta in January 2010. "This program is designed to help advance leading scholars into an emerging and exciting field of research," said Robert J. Strom, Ph.D., director of Entrepreneurship Research & Policy at the Foundation. "The findings generated by this effort will be translated into knowledge with immediate application for policymakers, educators, service providers and entrepreneurs as well as high-quality academic research."

The 2010 fellowship recipients, along with their university affiliations, are:

Francisco Buera, University of California, Los Angeles

Brett Anitra Gilbert, Texas A&M University

Jeremy Greene, Harvard University

William Kerr, Harvard Business School

Ramana Nanda, Harvard Business School

The Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship program is one of three academic recognition programs established by the Kauffman Foundation to help build a body of quality entrepreneurship research. The annual Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship Program, established in 2002, awards up to 15 grants of $20,000 each to Ph.D., D.B.A. or other doctoral students for the support of dissertations in the area of entrepreneurship. The Kauffman Prize Medal, established in 2005, is awarded every two years to one scholar under the age of 40 whose research has made a significant contribution to entrepreneurship. The Medal includes a $50,000 prize.

About the Kauffman Foundation

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private nonpartisan foundation that works to harness the power of entrepreneurship and innovation to grow economies and improve human welfare. Through its research and other initiatives, the Kauffman Foundation aims to open young people's eyes to the possibility of entrepreneurship, promote entrepreneurship education, raise awareness of entrepreneurship-friendly policies, and find alternative pathways for the commercialization of new knowledge and technologies. It also works to prepare students to be innovators, entrepreneurs and skilled workers in the 21st century economy through initiatives designed to improve learning in math, engineering, science and technology. Founded by late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman, the Foundation is based in Kansas City, Mo. and has approximately $2 billion in assets.

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CONTACTS: Barbara Pruitt, 816-932-1288, bpruitt@kauffman.org, Kauffman Foundation

Upcoming Lunch Series to Discuss Enterprise Research

admin — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:22:00 GMT

The Enterprise Initiative is pleased to announce an upcoming lunch series focusing on current research in the area of development economics. "Eats & Economics", to be held biweekly on Tuesdays throughout the winter and spring quarters, will highlight enterprise-focused research by both professors and students.

The lunches will be held from 12 - 1 pm in Rosenwald Hall Room 329 on the University of Chicago's campus. Lunch will be provided. Those planning to attend should RSVP to enterprise@uchicago.edu by noon on the Monday prior.

Details on the lunches can be found below.

January 20, 2009: John Felker & Kamilya Tazhibayeva, National Opinion Research Center and the University of Chicago, "Impact of Climate Change on Rice Production in Thailand"

February 3, 2009: Tiberiu Stef-Praun, Researcher at the Computation Institute, "Computational Tools for Economic Research"

February 24, 2009: Pierre Andre Chiappori, Professor at the University of Chicago, "Sharing Wage Risk"

March 3, 2009: Jorge O. Moreno, Economics Ph.D. Candidate, "Matching, Hedonic Equilibrium Contracts, and the Structure of the Credit Market: Evidence from the Mexican Banking System"

March 31, 2009: Benjamin Moll, Economics Ph.D. Candidate, "Wealth Inequality and Capital Misallocation in Developing Countries"

April 14, 2009: Victor Zhorin, Researcher at the Computation Institute, "Hierarchical Estimation of Structural Models with Endogenous Interactions"

April 28, 2009: Anna Paulson, Senior Financial Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, "Bank Crises and Investor Confidence"

May 12, 2009: Fernando Alvarez, Professor at the University of Chicago, "Technological Innovation and The Transactions Demand for Cash"

May 26, 2009: Anan Pawasutipaisit, Post-Doctoral Scholar at MIT, "Wealth Accumulation and Factors Accounting for Success"

Enterprising Spirit: Townsend Examines Thai Entrepreneurship

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Published: Jan / Feb 2008

Along a narrow gravel road in central Thailand’s Lopburi province stands a two-story house with a corrugated-steel roof. On a hot day last August a family of three sat cross-legged on the cobalt-tiled floor and talked about their life and work with interviewers from the Thai Family Research Project, a ten-year longitudinal study begun in 1997 by Robert Townsend, Chicago’s Charles E. Merriam professor in economics.

Thai Family Research Project investigators interview 2,280 households annually to track their borrowing, income, and family-structure changes.

With a group of Thai collaborators, Townsend has compiled a comprehensive database, documenting how rural people in the rapidly developing country are, for example, borrowing money to invest in new farm equipment or purchasing vehicles to begin trucking businesses. The aim—as the title of his forthcoming book, Financial Systems in Developing Economies; Growth, Inequality, and Policy Evaluation in Thailand (Oxford University Press), makes clear—is to help researchers and policy-makers guide emerging nations into the global economy.

The Thai Family Research Project has been a massive undertaking: local director Khun Sombat Sakuntasathhien oversees the small army of researchers—more than 60 surveyors and data-entry staff annually check in on 2,280 households to gather information about their borrowing, income, and changes in family structure. The farmers and villagers are dispersed among four different provinces that reflect the diversity of Thailand’s agricultural economy. Based on rice in some areas, and corn production and dairy cattle in others, both are now mixed with wage labor and industrialization.

As expanding access to credit has boosted both Thailand’s entrepreneurial activity and wealth, the country buzzes with activity, and the survey families, says Townsend, are at the leading edge of that prosperity, a fact with broad economic implications: “When properly unleashed, the entrepreneurial spirit has proven to be the greatest force for generating wealth that the world has ever known.”

This summer, with the help of a three-year, $3.3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Townsend and his colleagues launched a project that they hope will provide a model for how developing countries can encourage entrepreneurship to overcome poverty. “Discovering the Power of Free Enterprise” brings together researchers from Chicago, MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, and Yale’s Economic Growth Center who share an interest in applying general equilibrium models to a relatively new field known as enterprise economics.

Townsend has been influential in enterprise economics: his 1993 book, The Medieval Village Economy: A Study of the Pareto Mapping in General Equilibrium Models (Princeton University Press), set up economic models to study rental contracts, sharecropping, and land fragmentation in medieval England. His 1994 Econometrica paper, “Risk and Insurance in Village India,” applied similar equilibrium models to study how farmers in an area with inconsistent rainfall buffer the risks brought on by such bad years and how well households in the community, some of which may get hit harder than others, manage to pool these risks. Townsend’s Thai study stemmed from a desire to test whether the model worked in other villages and other countries.

Now the Free Enterprise project is taking the next step, studying poor and middle-income countries such as Cambodia, Ghana, and Mexico, as well as more advanced countries such as Spain, which underwent dramatic economic development as it entered the European Union. Four Chicago Nobelists who share Townsend’s interest in the free market and its role in developing countries—Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55; James Heckman; Robert Lucas, AB’59, PhD’64; and Roger Myerson—will take part, building on their own work and comparing and contrasting it to Townsend’s research.

Coupled with secondary data, including government reports on employment and income, the project’s aim is to chart the causes and effects of entrepreneurialism. Townsend’s work in Thailand, for example, has found a decided taste for entrepreneurial activity: since 1997 the number of Thais in business for themselves nearly doubled to 40 percent.

Those statistics get a human face in the interviews. In the survey’s early days Townsend spent much of his time in the field; now he returns several times throughout the year, cross-checking trends in the data with the participants’ individual experiences.

Thai farmers gather rice plants that they will plant in paddies, one element of Thailand’s rural economy that Chicago economist Robert Townsend’s research examines.

On his August visit to the family in Lopburi, he talks with the family about how their life has changed throughout the past decade. Nearby fields of sugar cane and corn have increased their yields as the farmer and his neighbors have adopted modern farming methods. Tractors, pesticides, and other items are purchased with loans, like those available from the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives in Thailand or through village cooperatives, such as the one for which the farmer is vice president. “We make small loans, mostly 7,000 to 15,000 baht [about $230 to $500],” he says. The banks and cooperatives help: “They reduce our dependence on borrowing from money lenders and also help us hire labor.”

For this farmer, the benefits of credit and improved information about farming techniques can be seen in the computer and television that rest on the long desk in his house’s main room. And although his parents, like most of their generation, had only a basic education, his teenage daughter takes a bus to a secondary school. Such progress is not without problems: “We have allergies to the chemicals” used in the fields, the farmer’s wife says.

Yet the family’s experience seems to underscore Townsend’s entrepreneurial thesis. “We have learned ways to make our fields more profitable,” the father says, and we are happy that has helped us send our daughter to high school and maybe in the future on to more education.”

Link:http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0812/chicago_journal/enterprising_spirit.shtml

Templeton Foundation Funds Major Study of Entrepreneurship in Developing World

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:38:00 GMT

Published: March 20, 2008

The John Templeton Foundation has provided a $3.3 million grant for a new project to focus on wealth creation and poverty reduction in developing countries by bringing together some of the nation’s leading economists and scholars to form The Enterprise Initiative, based at the University of Chicago.

University scholars will join researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Poverty Action Lab and Yale’s Economic Growth Center.

The researchers will assemble data and develop high-quality models that will focus on the role of enterprise and simulate the impact of various alternative polices, according to project director Robert Townsend, the Charles E. Merriam Professor of Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. With the help of researchers at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, the Enterprise Initiative integrates advanced computation and seeks to develop an innovative and complex web-based program that will be able to provide visual simulations of different policies. The new models created will evaluate the choice of occupation, education and access to credit and insurance at the household levels, and simulate the impact on growth, inequality and poverty reduction at the regional and national levels.

“This project will help us explain the story behind successful enterprise and its impact,” Townsend said. “Traditionally, economic research has been divided in its approaches and fields. We will seek to integrate subfields and promote a more holistic approach to looking at development.” He termed the approach “applied general equilibrium enterprise economics.”

Townsend’s work in Thailand, in which he examined individual decisions in the home and determined the relationship of those choices to economic changes on a national level, spurred the Enterprise Initiative. Thailand is a prototypical developing Asian economy with a strong culture and history of entrepreneurial activity.

Townsend’s research integrates survey and geographic data from government ministries with his own longitudinal survey data. The Townsend Thai data comes from the Thai Family Research Project, which Townsend helped establish and has co-directed for more than 10 years. That project is an ongoing longitudinal study of nearly 3,000 households in Thailand. Townsend’s upcoming book, Financial Systems in Developing Economies: Growth, Inequality, and Policy Evaluation in Thailand, features important new findings on the relationship between individuals’ choices and entrepreneurial behavior and overall economic growth, including:

•   Poverty has decreased by more than 60% in the past 35 years, with dramatic regional patterns of growth, first concentrating around urban centers, and later in more remote areas. However, inequality persists.
•   Households have made persistent transitions from rice farming to other occupations, including business. Since profits from business are high relative to wage labor, and early on there were few households in business, this transition is associated with an increase in per-capita income and a growth in inequality. However, this income differential has decreased as demand from industrialization eventually increased the wages of unskilled labor.
•    Occupation shifts, education and enhanced intermediation account for 39% of income and inequality change.
•    Approximately 80% of the growth in productivity at the national level is due to entrepreneurial activity, along with an expanding formal financial sector.
•    After Thailand faced an economic crisis in 1997 and wages dropped, the share of households in business for themselves nearly doubled to 40%, though these businesses were not as profitable as those established before the crisis.
•    The availability of credit from government loan programs and community-based cooperative loan arrangements has had a notable impact on consumption, profits and wages.

Building from Townsend’s research, The Enterprise Initiative will use the precise data from Thailand to construct the monthly income, balance sheets and cash-flow statements of scientifically sampled households, to evaluate the effects of entrepreneurship on macro-economic growth. Additionally, the Initiative will seek to collect new data from other emerging economies, such as Ghana, Mexico and India, to test economic theories and evaluate enterprise on a wider scale.

Housed at the University’s distinguished Economics Department, the Enterprise Initiative will tackle questions developed by economists as they incorporate their expertise to evaluate the range of choices and consequences that arise as an economy grows, or fails to grow.

The researchers’ high-quality data will assist policy-makers in modeling different policy options. Researchers will be able to suggest, for instance, how constructing a road in a particular area could boost business and what financial products and services could be most effective in encouraging development. The project will also shed new light on the circumstances that lead to the growth of entrepreneurialism, a critical asset in emerging economies.

The project intends to examine how people in ordinary circumstances become involved in the creation of wealth for their own benefit, and ultimately the benefit of many others. It will examine factors, such as mindsets, aspirations and talent, which enable people to overcome obstacles and become accomplished entrepreneurs.

By gathering data, sharing the stories of successful individuals who have made transformations from poverty to relative abundance, modeling choices and modeling their impact on the larger economy, the project hopes to provide guidance to policy-makers and others who are looking to alleviate world poverty.

Link: http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1303

Mexican Social Development Secretariat Teams with National Opinion Research Center

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:37:00 GMT

Published: April 24, 2008

Mexico’s social and economic development could get a boost through an agreement signed Thursday between the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago and Mexican Secretariat of Social Development (SEDESOL).

The agreement will facilitate research to improve social programs for the poor and provide critical data for economic analysis of the country as a whole. Combining the expertise of policy makers on the ground and the researchers at the University of Chicago, the agreement aims to make new strides in evaluating current programs and devising new approaches to spur economic growth.

Researchers and policy makers from both organizations in Mexico and the United States will come together to form a technical committee that will determine the research priorities.

“Once the committee determines the research agenda, SEDESOL will help provide access to the information and the NORC will carry out the research project, with the participation of SEDESOL,” said Javier Suárez Morales, Director General, SEDESOL, who came Thursday to Chicago to sign the agreement, which had also been previously signed by Felix Velez, Undersecretary for SEDESOL.

For the project, the Mexican government will provide researchers at the University of Chicago with access to comprehensive data including, census information, survey information, geographic information, and data on the characteristics of beneficiaries of social programs. Researchers from both institutions will work together to evaluate the impact of different socioeconomic programs implemented by SEDESOL and model policy alternatives.

SEDESOL will work closely with researchers at NORC to determine research topics of mutual interest that will not only benefit SEDESOL’s programming efforts, but will also strengthen academic understandings of poverty, development and growth in Mexico. “The agreement will strengthen the cooperation between the NORC and SEDESOL and promote the integration and development of databases that will collect the kinds of information researchers need to develop computer simulations that suggest how the Mexican government can make infrastructure changes, educational investments, and other improvements that would lead to economic expansion,” said Robert Townsend, the Charles Merriam Professor in Economics at the University.

“NORC is very pleased to enter into this agreement with SEDESOL. Combining the rich data from SEDESOL with Professor Townsend's ground-breaking analytic approaches is certain to produce results that will both advance our understanding of the Mexican economy and provide insights that can inform decisions by Mexican policymakers,” said Jeffrey Telgarsky, Sr. Vice-President and Director, International Projects, NORC.

Townsend will spearhead the research initiative on behalf of NORC. His work on entrepreneurship and wealth creation in Thailand, supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, will provide the blueprint for analysis on Mexico.

Townsend’s most recent project, the Enterprise Initiative funded by the Templeton Foundation, collaborates with the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago to develop an innovative new web-based program to look at policy implications. The Computation Institute's new program uses models, maps and graphs to simulate and visualize policy changes. The approach has already been applied to Thailand and through the NORC-SEDESOL agreement, Townsend hopes to be able to better apply it to an emerging economy like Mexico.

SEDESOL functions as a ministry of the Mexican federal government and is responsible for furthering social and economic development. It provides important social programs for children, families, the elderly, agricultural workers and the unemployed.

Link: http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1341

Database on Developing Economies To Change Economics

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:01:00 GMT

Published: October 9, 2008
The most comprehensive set of data gathered on Thailand's developing economy is now available free online.

The Townsend Thai Data, which economist Robert Townsend and his colleagues gathered, is available at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/rtownsend.

The site includes 10 years of consecutive data, which will be updated with new information as it becomes available. The resource gives users not only a snapshot of economic life at a particular time, but a constantly evolving portrait of Thailand's economy at different levels.

"Here we have rich data from which academics and policy-makers alike could better understand household activities and behavior, as well as their relationship to the broader regional and national economy," said Townsend, a research professor at the University of Chicago and the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor at MIT.

The Townsend Thai data not only includes the traditional socioeconomic information on households, but it also features data on lending, borrowing, migration and family networks. The Thai Project has used state-of-the-art technology to measure environmental conditions for crop land, such as soil analysis, plot photos, daily rainfall, soil moisture, water chemistry and other bi-weekly water measurements.

Combining the Thai data with a broad range of data from national surveys and macroeconomic indicators, Townsend and his collaborators have come to better understand the role of individuals in creating national-level growth.

Combining the Thai data with a broad range of data from national surveys and macroeconomic Researchers have found that poverty in Thailand has decreased by more than 60 percent in the past 35 years and that households play a key role in changing economic conditions. The data shows that 80 percent of the growth in productivity at the national level is due to entrepreneurial activity at the household level, along with an expanding formal financial sector.

Lessons from the Thai data go beyond simply understanding the Thai context to provide broader lessons for developing economies across the globe, Townsend said. Economic models used on the data have provided important insights on global issues like rural development, microfinance, poverty, inequality, entrepreneurship, risk, financial systems, economic theory and policy evaluation.

The research needed to develop the information began when Townsend set out to determine a way to gather precise data on villages in Thailand. His journey not only led him to the field, where he visited families and talked with village leaders, but it also connected introduced him to Khun Sombat Sakuntasathhien, now local director of the project.

Together, they designed and implemented a survey in 1997 of nearly 3,000 households in four different provinces. Townsend has since led the Townsend Thai Project, an initiative that has been collecting monthly and annual data for more than a decade from thousands of farm and non-farm households in Thailand.

The Townsend Thai Project and Database Archive had the support of NORC, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Link: http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1455