Financial inclusion is crucial for the inclusive and sustainable economic growth of developing countries. Access to financial services to all citizens, particularly to low income and poor people is a key to promote inclusive growth. While rural financial inclusion assumes importance from policy...

In this chapter, we first discuss the limitations of traditional financial advice, which led to the emergence of robo-advising. We then describe the main features of robo-advising and propose a taxonomy of robo-advisors based on four defining dimensions - personalization, discretion,...

We study the spending response of first-time borrowers to an overdraft facility and elicit their preferences, beliefs, and motives through a FinTech application. Users increase their spending permanently, lower their savings rate, and reallocate spending from non-discretionary to discretionary...

The determinants of portfolio choice have been studied extensively in the field of household finance. In this paper we study the determinants of the decision to hold risky assets based on a novel dataset of German bank data. Our primary focus is the question whether East Germans differ in their...

This paper introduces the probabilistic formulation of continuous-time economic models: forward stochastic differential equations (SDE) govern the dynamics of backward-looking variables, and backward SDEs capture that of forward-looking variables. Deep learning streamlines the search for the...

In this paper we consider a risk averse worker who is moving back and forth between employment and unemployment; layoffs are random and beyond the worker s influence, while the re-employment chance is directly affected by search effort. We characterize the worker s optimal savings and job-search...

This paper explores the role of marriage when markets are incomplete so that individuals cannot diversify their idiosyncratic labor income risk. Ceteris paribus, an individual would prefer to marry a hedge (i.e. a spouse whose income is negatively correlated with her own) as it raises her...

The new information and communication technology, ICT, induces households to take over tasks from firms and government agencies, using tools and systems provided by these very same organizations. The result is often joint production activities. We argue that the importance of ICT for the...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherin a state s representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

This paper studies within-family decision making regarding investment in income protection for surviving spouses. A change in US pension law (the Retirement Equity Act of 1984) is used as an instrument to derive predictions both from a simple Nash-bargaining model of the household and from the...