A Preliminary Look at Occupational Choice and Financial Constraints in Rural Thailand

Thursday, January 21, 1999
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)
A/PARC Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall, East Wing, Second floor
Speaker: 
  • Anna Paulson

Entrepreneurs and self-employed people have much higher incomes than other rural Thai residents. This raises the question: why don't more people become entrepreneurs? One possibility is that people are prevented from changing their occupations because they lack wealth or access to credit. This talk provides a preliminary exploration of this issue using new survey data from rural Thailand. Anna Paulson is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She is currently a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and taught at Princeton before going to Kellogg. Her research is concerned with how people cope with risk, particularly in cases where formal financial and insurance markets are not available.