Working Papers
Intergenerational Transmission of Time Preferences: An Evidence from Rural Thailand
Weerachart T. Kilenthong, Suparee Boonmanunt, Sartja Duangchaiyoosook, Wasinee Jantorn and Varunee Khruapradit,
PIER Discussion Paper, May 6, 2022.
This study investigates the association between child and caregiver time preferences in rural Thailand. We find that caregiver discount factor is positively correlated to a child’s ability to delay gratification, indicating that patient children are more likely to have patient caregivers. This correlation exists regardless of whether the caregiver is a biological parent or not. However, some evidence suggests genetic contribution in intergenerational transmission of time preferences: this correlation is stronger when both biological parents live at home than when none is present, and mother’s time preferences is stronger correlated with child time preferences than grandmother’s.
Learning Losses from School Closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic for Thai Kindergartners This paper presents empirical evidence of learning losses from school closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic for kindergartners using a large-scale school readiness survey in Thailand. Its findings indicate that school closure during the outbreak of COVID-19 causes enormous learning losses in cognitive skills, especially in mathematics and working memory. The negative impact is heterogeneous across several dimensions, including child gender, special needs, wealth, having private tutoring, caregiver’s education and parental absence. This paper also estimates daily learning gains, of which significant results confirm that going to school has significantly benefited young children, especially in receptive language, mathematics and working memory.
Weerachart T. Kilenthong and Khanista Boonsanong, Sartja Duangchaiyoosook, Wasinee Jantorn and Varunee Khruapradit,
PIER Discussion Paper, March 10, 2022.
Segregated Security Exchanges with Ex Ante Rights to Trade: A Market-Based Solution to Collateral-Constrained Externalities
Weerachart T. Kilenthong and Robert M. Townsend, NBER Working Paper, May 2014.
This paper studies a competitive general equilibrium model with default and endogenous collateralized contracts. The possibility of trade in spot markets creates externalities, as spot prices and the bindingness of collateral constraints interact. We propose a market based solution which overcomes the externalities problem and obviates the needs for any government policy intervention. If agents are allowed to contract ex ante on market fundamentals determining the state-contingent spot prices used to unwind collateral, over and above contracting on true underlying states of the world, then standard existence and welfare theorems apply, that is, competitive equilibria are equivalent with Pareto optima.
