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- February 2021
- Article
Do Household Wealth Shocks Affect Productivity? Evidence from Innovative Workers During the Great Recession
By: S. Bernstein, T. McQuade and R. Townsend
We investigate how the deterioration of household balance sheets affects worker productivity, and, in turn, economic downturns. Specifically, we compare the output of innovative workers who experienced differential declines in housing wealth during the financial crisis...
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- February 2020
- Case
Rotoplas: Bringing More and Better Water
By: John D. Macomber and Carla Larangeira
Private companies were being turned to for potable water in the world’s megacities due to impacts of climate change including droughts and flooding. Mexico City had endured several water-related crises, with its population suffering from floods, droughts, water...
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- June 2019
- Article
Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines
By: Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan and Benjamin Roth
A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision-making of...
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Keywords:
Borrowing and Debt;
Household;
Personal Finance;
Decision Making;
Behavior;
India;
Philippines
- 2018
- Chapter
Behavioral Household Finance
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Can Security Design Foster Household Risk-Taking?
By: Laurent Calvet, Claire Celerier, Paolo Sodini and Boris Vallée
This paper shows that securities with a non-linear payoff design can foster household risk-taking. We demonstrate this effect empirically by exploiting the introduction of capital guarantee products in Sweden from 2002 to 2007. The fast and broad adoption of these...
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- October 22, 2012
- Article
Interest Rate Pass-Through: Mortgage Rates, Household Consumption, and Voluntary Deleveraging
By: Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani, Benjamin Keys, Tomasz Piskorski, Rodney Ramcharan, Amit Seru and Vincent Yao
Exploiting variation in the timing of resets of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), we find that a sizable decline in mortgage payments (up to 50%) induces a significant increase in car purchases (up to 35%). This effect is attenuated by voluntary deleveraging. Borrowers...
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- May 2014
- Article
Political Reservations and Women's Entrepreneurship in India
By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Stephen D. O'Connell
We quantify the link between the timing of state-level implementations of political reservations for women in India with the role of women in India's manufacturing sector. While overall employment of women in manufacturing does not increase after the reforms, we find...
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- March 2012
- Article
How to Make Finance Work
By: Robin Greenwood and David S. Scharfstein
Once a sleepy old boys' club, the U.S. financial sector is now a dynamic and growing business that attracts the best and the brightest. It is tempting to declare the industry a roaring success. But its purpose is to serve the needs of U.S. households and firms, and by...
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- Article
Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco
By: Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, William Pariente and Vincent Pons
Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households' willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves health but
because...
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- Article
Credit Access and Social Welfare: The Rise of Consumer Lending in the United States and France
By: Gunnar Trumbull
Research into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis has drawn attention to a link between growing income inequality in the United States and high household indebtedness. Most accounts trace the U.S. idea of credit-as-welfare to the period of wage stagnation and...
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- Fall 2011
- Article
A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance
By: J. Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano
In this brief history of U.S. consumer finance since World War II, the sector is defined based on the functions delivered by firms in the form of payments, savings and investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice. Evidence of major trends in consumption,...
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- 2010
- Working Paper
A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance
By: Andrea Ryan, Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano
This article describes the consumer finance sector in the US since World War II. We first define the sector in terms of the functions delivered by firms (payments, savings/investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice.) We provide time series evidence on...
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- September 2010 (Revised December 2010)
- Case
Santander Consumer Finance
By: J. Gunnar Trumbull, Elena Corsi and Andrew Barron
A Spanish company has to decide if they should expand into the fragmented European consumer finance market and has to make important organizational strategy decisions in the midst of the world economic downturn that followed the 2007 U.S. credit crunch. Since 2002, the...
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- 2010
- Other Unpublished Work
Is High School the Right Time to Teach Self-control? The Effect of Financial Education and Mathematics Courses on Savings Behavior
By: Shawn A. Cole and Gauri Kartini Shastry
Household financial behavior affects household welfare and the economy at large. Yet our understanding of how to improve financial decisions is limited. Recent literature and policy attention have focused on financial education, for example, in high school. We use...
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- 2008
- Working Paper
Just Keep My Money! Supporting Tax-time Savings with U.S. Savings Bonds
By: Peter Tufano
This paper reports the results of a 2007 experiment testing if specific process simplification can foster increased take-up rates for savings products, particularly by low-to-moderate income (LMI) households. Tax refund recipients at certain H&R Block tax preparation...
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- 2006
- Working Paper
The Effect of Dividends on Consumption
By: Malcolm Baker, Stefan Nagel and Jeffrey Wurgler
Classical models predict that the division of stock returns into dividends and capital appreciation does not affect investor consumption patterns, while mental accounting and other economic frictions predict that investors have a higher propensity to consume from stock...
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- Research Summary
Overview
By: Boris Vallee
Professor Vallée focuses on financial innovation, investigating it from different angles. This research thread has led him to relate the methods and insights of corporate finance and banking with those of other subfields, including household finance, public finance,...
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- Research Summary
Overview
By: Mark L. Egan
When considering how households make investment decisions, Professor Egan became intrigued by the question, “What makes a bank ‘special’ when compared to other lending institutions?” Focusing on empirical industrial organization with applications to finance and...
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