Millions of ultra-poor households in sub-Saharan Africa rely exclusively on savings groups to meet their financial needs. However, the ability of savings groups to fully meet these needs remains unclear. We randomly assign ultra-poor Ugandan households to savings groups containing different proportions of ultra-poor members. We find evidence that groups may be unable to satisfy the borrowing ne...

The rapid increase of wealth inequality in the past few decades is a most disturbing social and economic issue of our time. In order to control, and even reverse that surge, its origin and underlying mechanisms should be revealed. One of the challenges in studying these mechanisms is to incorporate realistic individual dynamics in the population level in a self-consistent manner. Our theoretica...

Financial Constraints, The findings suggest that across very different financial Uses of Funds, systems, financial markets and and Firm Growth intermediaries have a comparative advantage in funding short-term An International Comparison investment. An active, though not necessarily large, stock market and high scores on an Asli Demirgu,c-Kunt index of respect for legal Vojislav Maksimovic norms...

Good health is not something we can buy. However, it can be an extremely valuable savings account.

We focus on automatic strategies to optimize life cycle savings and investment. Classical optimal savings theory establishes that, given the level of risk aversion, a saver would keep the same relative amount invested in risky assets at any given time. We show that, when optimizing lifecycle investment, performance and risk assessment have to take into account the investor's risk aversion and t...