This study examined the impact of declaring consumer bankruptcy on the physical and mental health of adult women and if outcomes differed depending on whether the filer received automatic debt discharge under Chapter 7 compared to a debt repayment plan with Chapter 13. Sample data consisted of women from the NLSY79 cohort who completed the age 40 and 50 health modules as of the most recent wave...

Reject inference is the problem of inferring the good and bad properties of those customers who have not been accepted for a loan. We present a reject inference method based on the confidence interval of a median survival time to delayed repayment. In this method, survival model is built based on the accepted applicant data and is applied to the rejected applicant. If the lower limit of the 90%...

This paper attempts to quantify the ill-effects of covariate shocks such as natural disasters on the sustainability of microfinance. The vulnerability of microfinance to covariate shocks is wellknown theoretically and in anecdotes, but very few quantitative evidence exists. For our attempt, we use a unique dataset of about 3,000 micro-borrower households covering over a period of 1994-2006 incl...

President Obama has challenged Americans to improve their communities and country through service to others. There are many ways one can serve others but few ways one can do this and benefit financially from one’s service. The National Health Service Corps (NHSC) offers physicians and others in health care a way to do exactly this. With a $300 million expansion from the American Recovery and Re...