The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) is an Asian think tank focused on identifying effective development strategies for Asia and the Pacific, and on providing support to ADB member countries in managing development challenges. It was established in Tokyo in 1996 as a subsidiary of Asian Development Bank, with initial and subsequent financing from the Government of Japan. ADBI is located on the 8th floor of the Kasumigaseki Building in Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda, Tokyo. ADBI was ranked 1st in the world among government-affiliated think tanks in the 2020 Global Go To Think Tanks Index Report by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program of the University of Pennsylvania..
The paper investigates the effect of prudential policies on sovereign bond vulnerability to global spillover risk in ASEAN-4 countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand). Using a risk network among sovereign bonds, the direct effect is that markets with tighter prudential policies have significantly smaller spillovers from the Treasury yield shocks of other regional and global economies. Combining with indirect effects, prudential policies reduce sovereign spillover risks in the long term. These findings suggest prudential policies have dual efficiency in sovereign risk regulation and Treasury internationalization.
Traditional gender equity interventions, such as financial inclusion programs, vocational training, and cash transfers, often fail to address the root causes of gender disparities, particularly the disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic labor on women. This study evaluates a novel couple and community based intervention designed to reshape intra-household labor allocation, gender stereotypes, and decision-making. Using a randomized controlled trial in Uttar Pradesh, India, we compare two approaches: (1) private couple counseling and (2) private counseling combined with community-based intervention that leverages public accountability and cooperative decision-making. Our findings show that both interventions significantly improve intra-household cooperation, with the community-based gender sensitive intervention (Treatment 2) yielding stronger and more persistent effects. Women in Treatment 2 experienced reductions of about 40 minutes in unpaid domestic chores and 45 minutes in unpaid care, two non-overlapping components of unpaid domestic labor. Participants in both interventions reported significant reductions in domestic violence and shifts in gender stereotypes. Follow-up data collected one year later confirm the persistence of these effects, particularly in reducing unpaid domestic labor and enhancing men’s caregiving roles. Lab-in-the field experiment at endline shows that Treatment 2 increased willingness to trust and reciprocate among both men and women. Results affirm the potential of engaging men and the community in interventions to achieve improvements in gender equity.
Informal employment continues to dominate labor markets in developing economies, with digital platforms rapidly expanding the organization of low- to mid-skill service work. This coexistence raises an economic puzzle: what explains workers’ sorting into digital platform (gigs) versus traditional offline informal work, beyond differences in technology access and observed earnings? Little is known about how economic preferences, especially risk tolerance, and soft skills are distributed across digital platform and traditional offline informal workers, and whether these soft skills help explain why some informal workers engage in digital platform while others remain in traditional offline informal employment. We address this gap by using a lab-in-the-field experiment with informal service workers in urban India (dominantly male) by building on a post-sorting framework in which workers are already engaged in either digital platform (D) or traditional offline (T) work modes. We elicit incentivized measures of risk tolerance and selected soft skills, and collect harmonized information on perceived working conditions. Our results show substantial heterogeneity by age and work mode, such that younger T workers display higher risk tolerance than D workers, whereas older D workers are more likely to be risk-neutral or risk-averse. D workers also exhibit higher self-control and openness, but lower grit and conscientiousness, relative to T workers. These patterns are consistent with sorting in secondary labor markets based on heterogeneous trade-offs over income risk, flexibility, and community-based security, rather than simple adoption of new work technology. Our findings are best interpreted as applying to male urban informal service workers. Policies that seek to improve welfare in dual labor markets should combine platform expansion with risk-sharing and skill-building interventions and minimum standards for worker protection.
This article aims to disentangle the combined effect of internal corporate governance and market competition on risk-taking in the Indian insurance industry. Using data from 2014–2021, the study applies dynamic panel threshold regression and the two-step system GMM. Results reveal a strong risk dynamism and a non-linear relationship between internal governance, competition, and risk-taking in the Indian insurance industry. We note that adopting stringent governance helps only up to a certain threshold in managing risk effectively, and the standalone effect of competition confirms the “Martinez-Miera and Repullo hypothesis”. Notably, the study highlights a “complementary” relationship between internal governance and market competition, implying that internal governance is more effective in mitigating risk in a competitive environment. However, on the organisational front, our estimates hold a “substitution hypothesis” for life insurance firms and a “complementary hypothesis” for non-life insurance firms.
