A Rainy Day

Saving on a Rainy Day, Borrowing for a Rainy Day

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show empirically that these saving spikes were short-lived and common to all working age groups. We then study lif...

Saving for a (not so) Rainy Day: A Randomized Evaluation of Savings Groups in Mali

High transaction and contracting costs are often thought to create credit and savings market failures in developing countries. The microfinance movement grew largely out of business process innovations and subsidies that reduced these costs. We examine an alternative approach, one that infuses no external capital and introduces no change to formal contracts: an improved...

Is the Series of Rainy/non-rainy Days a Bernoulli Trial Sequence?

The concept of dependent random variables finds an important application in so-called time series, which are models of how a random quantity varies in time. In the case when time is discrete or discretized, as for example happens when one considers variables with daily, monthly or annual values (daily close of the stock market, monthly average temperatures, annual sales, score of i baseball gam...

Not Just for a Rainy Day: Some Findings on the Role of Savings from the Financial Diaries in Malawi

Pay Today for a Rainy Day: Improved Approximation Algorithms for Demand-Robust Min-Cut and Shortest Path Problems

Demand-robust versions of common optimization problems were recently introduced by Dhamdhere et al. [4] motivated by the worst-case considerations of two-stage stochastic optimization models. We study the demand robust min-cut and shortest path problems, and exploit the nature of the robust objective to give improved approximation factors. Specifically, we give a (1 + √ 2) approximation for rob...