This course covers current research on topics in the growing field of household finance. It is designed to bring students to the research frontier in terms of methods and questions and to advance students’ development as economists by providing training in the production of high-quality research.
The course topics build out from the household budget constraint, covering the consumption, borrowing, and investment decisions of households and the roles of businesses, governments, and financial intermediaries who help shape these decisions. We will discuss household financial decision-making, market failures in consumer finance settings, the macroeconomic implications of household finance, and the design of related public policies. Students will engage with theoretical models, reduced-form and structural empirical research, and some of the core datasets used at the frontier in household finance research.
Throughout the course we will emphasize the overlap between household finance and other fields in economics, including public finance, industrial organization, macroeconomics, labor, corporate finance, asset pricing, and behavioral economics.
Specific topics and themes include:
- Consumption and public policy
- Retirement savings and household intertemporal optimization
- Retail investing
- Mortgage choice, default, refinancing, mortgage design, and stabilization policy
- Housing, household structure, and mobility
- Student loans and human capital investment
- Unsecured credit and insurance
- Asymmetric information and its remedies
