Prompting microfinance borrowers to save: A field experiment from Guatemala

The article reports on the results of an experiment that introduced a new set of commercial products based on planning and reminders to help microfinance borrowers from Guatemala's largest public-sector bank build their savings. Behavioral explanations for the difficulty of saving focus on the group of individuals who wish to save but prove unable to do so. The bank had no intention and no legal means of enforcing any of these self-commitments. Hence, these savings plans offer individuals a psychological means of committing themselves to a savings trajectory with no financial penalties for failing to implement it. Despite a wealth of recent empirical work demonstrating the efficacy of hard commitment, there are at least two reasons why self-commitment may provide a more attractive alternative in practice. Self-commitment, if effective at promoting savings, retains broad latitude for households to use savings to protect themselves from shocks even during the asset-accumulation phase

The Impact of New EUV Diagnostics on CME-Related Kinematics

We present the application of novel diagnostics to the spectroscopic observation of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) on disk by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on the Hinode spacecraft. We apply a recently developed line profile asymmetry analysis to the spectroscopic observation of NOAA AR 10930 on 14-15 December 2006 to three raster observations before and during the eruption of a 1000km/s CME. We see the impact that the observer's line-of-sight and magnetic field geometry have on the diagnostics used. Further, and more importantly, we identify the on-disk signature of a high-speed outflow behind the CME in the dimming region arising as a result of the eruption. Supported by recent coronal observations of the STEREO spacecraft, we speculate about the momentum flux resulting from this outflow as a secondary momentum source to the CME. The results presented highlight the importance of spectroscopic measurements in relation to CME kinematics, and the need for full-disk synoptic spectroscopic observations of the coronal and chromospheric plasmas to capture the signature of such explosive energy release as a way of providing better constraints of CME propagation times to L1, or any other point of interest in the heliosphere.Comment: Accepted to appear in Solar Physics Topical Issue titled "Remote Sensing of the Inner Heliosphere". Manuscript has 14 pages, 5 color figures. Movies supporting the figures can be found in http://download.hao.ucar.edu/pub/mscott/papers/Weathe