Grants

University of Oxford

To promote and advance international comparative studies of household finance

  • Amount $845,747
  • City Oxford, United Kingdom
  • Investigator Tarun Ramadorai
  • Year 2011
  • Program Research
  • Sub-program Economics

Researchers who study household finance study how households make investment decisions, with a particular eye on the common, costly mistakes households make when making important investment choices, such as purchasing a home or allocating savings for retirement. As such, conclusions reached by researchers in this field are highly relevant to policy and regulatory issues of consumer protection, financial literacy, and financial product design. Unfortunately, however, household finance research has tended to focus on households in a small number of developed countries such as the U.S., Sweden, and Finland, that have good, easily accessible data on household investment behavior. Though understandable-good research requires good data-the small number of such countries limits the usefulness of the research conducted, since it is unclear how lessons learned from the household financial behavior of Swedes might be applied to Brazil or India where market conditions, social norms, and national institutions differ substantially. This grant supports the work of Tarun Ramadorai of Oxford University and John Y. Campbell of Harvard University who are working to broaden and enrich the field of household finance by bringing new international comparative perspectives to the field. Over the next three years, Ramadorai and Campbell will create a new international dataset on household financial behavior sourced from both developed and developing economies. Grant funds will support the creation of this dataset, its analysis, a fellowship to encourage participation by foreign economists in the project, and several conferences and academic workshops focused on topics relevant to the field.

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