Collection costs associated with servicing a major UK charity’s donation banks and collecting unsold goods from their retail shops can account for up to 20% of the overall income gained. Bank and shop collections are commingled and are typically made on fixed days of the week irrespective of the amounts of materials waiting to be collected. . Using collection records from a major UK charity, th...

Collection costs associated with servicing a major UK charity's donation banks and collecting unsold goods from their retail shops can account for up to 20% of the overall income gained. Bank and shop collections are commingled and are typically made on fixed days of the week irrespective of the amounts of materials waiting to be collected. Using collection records from a major UK charity, this...

We use quasi-random access to the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) to identify the causal effect of refinancing a mortgage on borrower balance sheet outcomes. We find that on average, refinancing into a lower-rate mortgage enabled borrowers to cut their default rates on mortgages by around 40% and their rates of serious delinquency on non-mortgage debts by about 25%. Refinancing also ca...

Parcel sorting is becoming a significant challenge for delivery distribution centers and mostly automated by using high-throughput machinery, but manual work still used to feed these machines placing the parcels on conveyor belt. In this paper, an AI-based robotic solution that automates parcel placement task was developed. The architecture of proposed system along with methods how implement it...

I examine how bank liquidity and capital affect banks’ behavior in asset sales using data on sales of bank owned real estate. I find that: (1) banks with lower liquidity levels post lower asking prices and receive lower sale prices; (2) banks with lower capital levels post higher asking prices, which then lead to longer time on the market. Further analyses show that the results are unlikely to ...

Recent studies have shown that the majority of the poor lack access to formal banking services of any kind and have emphasized the importance of enabling savings. Using a field experiment I investigate the impact of expanding household access to a savings account with no withdrawal fees on savings and borrowing behavior, assets accumulation, and investment in health and education. A savings acc...