Download or read book Three Essays in Household Finance written by Frederick Kibon Changwony and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Household Finance written by Yannis Mesquida and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thèse. HEC. 2019

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Finance written by Alexander Calen Aberlin Kaufman and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation presents three essays on household finance. All three focus on contemporary U.S. consumer credit markets, with particular attention paid to how market organization and firm incentives mediate the way firms interact with customers and the types of contracts they offer. The first essay examines the question of whether securitization was responsible for poor underwriting standards during the recent mortgage crisis. The second essay attempts to quantify the effect of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's intervention in the conforming mortgage market on equilibrium outcomes such as price and contract structure. The third essay investigates how mutual ownership of a firm by its customers can limit that firm's incentive to offer contracts meant to take advantage of customers' behavioral biases.

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Finance written by Christiana Marina Sintou and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Finance written by Arpit Gupta and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation centers on the role of adverse shocks to household balance sheets in understanding consumer default behavior. The first chapter studies the role of foreclosure contagion: the role of proximate foreclosures in causally triggering other nearby residential defaults and foreclosures. I find that foreclosure activity causally increases nearby rates of consumer defaults. This paper uses an instrument further examined in the second essay which analyzes the role for adverse selection and moral hazard in mortgage markets; using as a distinction the initial and post-reset interest rates paid on Adjustable-Rate Mortgage contracts. The final essay analyzes the role for cancer diagnosis shocks on household default behavior.

Download or read book Three Essays in Household Finance written by Brian K. Baugh and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the third essay, I study the extent to which defined contribution (DC) asset allocation is influenced by plan defaults and whether individuals exercise their option to leave the DC plan. I analyze the investments of 13,500 employees in a state-sponsored retirement plan and find persistent effects of default allocations. Cohorts born in the 1990s hold 16.5% less in money market funds (the historical default allocation) and over 25% more in target date funds (the current default allocation) than those born in the 1980s and earlier. I then analyze a unique feature of the DC plan which enables individuals to transition to a defined benefit (DB) plan (or DB/DC mix) five years after their initial hire date. I find that 22% of individuals exercise this option, 90% of which switch to a more conservative plan. Switching out of DC plans is concentrated in years following the Great Recession and decreases substantially in the post-recession recovery. Individuals invested in the guaranteed return fund are the least likely to exercise the option to switch plans.

Download or read book Three Essays in Household Finance written by Ahmad-Reza Michael Sharifi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the role of housing in the portfolio. The first chapter incorporates home price index futures into a household portfolio choice problem. The second chapter suggests and evaluates the predictive power of Microdata-based variables for forecasting home prices. The third chapter presents a theoretical model of mortgage default which emphasizes the service flow of owning a home.

Download or read book Essays in Household Finance written by Fernando Lopez (Professor of finance) and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the determinants of individual financial decision making and the welfare implications of those decisions. In the first essay, I consider an important dimension of individual welfare, namely mental health, to study whether the use of different financial services helped to withstand the damage caused by a large earthquake that hit Chile in February 2010. Using a rich nationally representative panel data set and geographic differences in ground shaking caused by the earthquake as an exogenous source of damage, I find that earthquake insurance reduced the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by more than 50% among individuals who lived in properties that were damaged by the earthquake. However, I find no significant effects for the amount of savings and bank relationships. Overall, these results suggest that the welfare impact of financial services is driven by the ability to transfer resources across states of the world, but not through time. In the second essay, I study the extent to which low income students in the U.S. understand and take into consideration the financial aspects of their higher education. Using a rich data set from a large U.S. non-profit organization, I find that low income post-secondary students are poorly informed about three main financial aspects of their higher education: expected income, financing costs and opportunity cost of being enrolled. This result holds for students who are academically talented, have been exposed to financial education (including a semester-long personal finance class) and relevant financial experiences. Furthermore, preliminary results of a randomized controlled trial (N=117) suggest that an hour-long financial education workshop on the main financial aspects of college increases students' GPA by 0.2 points (p-value=0.15) and their ability to receive financial aid from the non-profit organization by 11.4 percentage points (p-value=0.25). Overall, these results suggest that (lack of) financial literacy can affect both educational attainment and financial outcomes of low income post-secondary students. In the third essay, I study if civic capital, defined as the set of values and beliefs within a community that promote cooperation for socially valuable purposes (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2011), affects the use of deposit accounts among Chilean households. Using an institutional setting of limited supply side barriers for access to deposit accounts and a rich household data set, I find that households from areas with higher levels of civic capital, measured as the rate of registration to vote, are more likely to have savings accounts and hold larger amounts in those accounts. This association is stronger for households that are less educated and less intensive users of communication and information devices such as phone, computer and the internet. These results are consistent with the idea that civic capital helps to overcome educational and informational barriers that limit the demand for deposit accounts.

Download or read book Three Essays in Household Finance written by Andreas Fagereng and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains three chapters relating to the field of household finance. In the first chapter household life cycle investment behaviour is investigated using a panel of Norwegian administrative data and tax records. Dealing with selection and identification issues, the data suggests a double adjustment as people age: a rebalancing of the portfolio away from stocks as households approach retirement, and a peak in stock market participation around the time when they reach retirement. A theoretical model predicting these life cycle patterns of investment behavior is then provided. This is achieved by extending existing models with a per period participation cost in risky asset markets and a small perceived probability of being cheated. In the second chapter the relation between household financial asset holdings and unemployment is investigated. Consistent with a simple theoretical model, the data shows increased savings and a shift towards safer assets in the years leading up to unemployment, and depletion of savings during unemployment. This suggests that at least some households can foresee and prepare for upcoming unemployment, which indicates that private savings can complement publicly provided unemployment insurance. The final chapter identifies the causal effect of lump-sum severance payments on non-employment duration in Norway by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at age 50. A severance payment worth 1.2 months' earnings lowers the fraction re-employed after one year by six percentage points. This effect is decreasing in wealth, which supports the view that the effect of severance pay should be interpreted as evidence of liquidity constraints. Finding liquidity constraints in Norway, despite its equitable wealth distribution and generous welfare state, suggests they are likely to exist also in other countries.

Download or read book Essays on Household Finance written by Bruno Ferman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. The first chapter studies whether credit demand is sensitive to interest rates, to the prominence of interest rate disclosure, and to nudges. Consumer credit regulations usually require that lenders disclose interest rates. However, lenders can evade the spirit of these regulations by concealing rates in the fine print and highlighting low monthly payments. I explore the importance of such evasion in Brazil, where consumer credit for lower and middle income borrowers is expanding rapidly, despite particularly high interest rates. By randomizing contract interest rates and the degree of interest rate disclosure, I show that most borrowers are highly rate-sensitive, whether or not interest rates are prominently disclosed in marketing materials. An exception is high-risk borrowers, for whom rate disclosure matters. These clients are rate-sensitive only when disclosure is prominent. I also show that borrowers who choose this type of financing are responsive to nudges that favor longer-term plans. Despite this evidence, the financial consequences of information disclosure, even for high-risk borrowers, are relatively modest, and clients are less susceptible to nudges when the stakes are higher. Together, these results suggest that consumers in Brazil are surprisingly adept at decoding information even when lenders try to obfuscate the interest rate information, suggesting a fair amount of sophistication in this population. The second chapter (co-authored with Leonardo Bursztyn, Florian Ederer, and Noam Yuchtman) studies the importance of peer effects in financial decisions. Using a field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we attempt to disentangle channels through which a person's financial decisions affect his peers'. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it because they learn from his choice ("social learning") and because his possession of the asset directly affects others' utility of owning the same asset ("social utility"). We randomize whether one member of a peer pair who chose to purchase an asset has that choice implemented, thus randomizing possession of the asset. Then, we randomize whether the second member of the pair: 1) receives no information about his peer, or 2) is informed of his peer's desire to purchase the asset and the result of the randomization determining possession. We thus estimate the effects of: (a) learning plus possession, and (b) learning alone, relative to a control group. In the control group, 42% of individuals purchased the asset, increasing to 71% in the "social learning only" group, and to 93% in the "social learning and social utility" group. These results suggest that herding behavior in financial markets may result from social learning, and also from a desire to own the same assets as one's peers. The third chapter (co-authored with Pedro Daniel Tavares) uses data on checking and savings accounts for a sample of clients from a large bank in Brazil to calculate the prevalence and cost of "borrowing high and lending low" behavior in a setting where the spread between the borrowing and saving rates is on the order of 150% per year. We find that most clients maintain an overdrawn account at least one day a year while having liquid assets. However, the yearly amount of avoidable financial charges would only correspond, on average, to less than 0.5% of clients' yearly earnings. We also show that consumers are less likely to engage in such behavior when the costs of doing so are higher. These results suggest that the spread between the borrowing and saving rates is a key determinant of this behavior.

Download or read book Three Essays on U S Household Debt and the Sources of Systemic Financial Fragility written by Thomas Herndon and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays which analyze the role of household debt in the financial crisis of 2007-2009, and weak recovery that followed. In these essays, I pursue the following research topics: 1) Estimation of the effects of mortgage fraud on losses to foreclosure, 2) Estimation of whether loan modifications increased or decreased debt, and 3) Analyzing the historical evolution of housing finance regulation to advance a proposal for reform. While formally independent, these essays share a common theoretical perspective located at the intersection of financial macroeconomics and political economy. These essays analyze how conflicts of interest and inside information in the structure of private mortgage securitization generated perverse incentives that increased financial fragility. These problems caused large losses to foreclosure for borrowers, investors, and the communities in which the foreclosures were located in. The first essay describes how mortgage fraud by the financial services industry concentrated risk and leverage on the borrowers least able to bear it. The industry then deceived investors who bought securities based on these mortgages about the level of risk they were taking on. This essay finds that excess losses to foreclosure borne by investors due to fraud were substantial, prolonged through time, and concentrated in economically fragile communities that did not recover from the financial crisis. The second essay discusses how a conflict of interest between loan servicers and investors impeded efficient debt restructuring in loan modifications. This essay finds that instead of mitigating losses for investors by forgiving debt, servicers increased borrowers' debt by imposing punitive fees. However, while these fees were profitable for servicers, they resulted in larger eventual losses for investors due to redefaults. The final essay locates the failures identified by the first two essays within the larger historical evolution of housing financial regulation. This essay proposes the creation of a new public option for household finance which would provide regulatory tools to prevent consumer protection abuses.

Download or read book Household Financial Choice written by Michael S. Finke and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines household characteristics the impact financial decision making. The first essay explores the role of cognitive ability in numeracy, risk tolerance, credit decisions, wealth and retirement savings and asset allocation and finds that cognitive ability is an important predictor of financial decisions. The second essay develops a new instrument to measure time discounting and models asset accumulation and asset allocation and finds that a factor score of intertemporal behaviors is significantly related to both asset accumulation and asset allocation. The third essay documents the decline in basic financial knowledge among households over 60 using a new financial literacy instrument developed to more accurately capture a household's ability to make effective balance sheet, credit, investment, and insurance choices.

Download or read book Essays in Household Finance written by Benjamin Guin and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of four independent essays on households' financial decisions. The first three essays examine relationships between households and banks. The first essay examines the determinants and aggregate implications of households' borrowing decisions on the mortgage market (chapter 1). The second essay analyses the determinants of households' access to and usage of bank accounts in transition economies (chapter 2). The third essay examines the behavior of households if banks are in distress with respect to their withdrawal decisions from deposit accounts (chapter 3). The last essay analyses the role of cultural determinants for households' saving decisions (chapter 4).

Download or read book Essays on Household Finance written by M. Angrisani and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Financial Economics written by Da Ke and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation examines economic determinants of household financial decisions and investor behaviors. It contains three essays. The first essay investigates whether gender norms shape intra-household financial decision making. Analyzing microdata covering more than 30 million U.S. households, I document that families with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than those with a wife of equal financial sophistication. Consistent with the gender norm hypothesis, the baseline effect is attenuated among individuals brought up by working mothers, but becomes stronger among descendants of pre-industrial societies in which women specialized in activities within the home and households with a husband born and raised in a southern state. A randomized controlled experiment further reveals that female identity hinders idea contribution by the wife. In contrast, male identity causes men to be less open to an opposing viewpoint of their wife, even if her proposition in optimal. These things suggest that gender identity norms can have real consequences for household financial well-being. The second essay explores the impact of local agglomeration economies on stock market participation. We find that when the industry in which individuals work is locally agglomerated, they are more likely to participate in the stock market. Further, we show that this relationship is especially strong among skilled workers. We find that the local agglomeration effect is not explained by risk tolerance, worker inertia, or a preference for stocks of firms that are in the same industry as the worker. Instead, our findings are consistent with local agglomeration enhancing human capital and in turn, raising workers' optimal allocations to risky assets. More generally, our analysis underscores the role of geography in shaping human capital and household financial decisions. The third essay examines whether momentum in stock prices is induced by changes in the political environment. We find that momentum profits are concentrated among politically sensitive firms and industries. A trading strategy with a long position in winner portfolios that are politically unfavored and a short position in losers that are politically favored eliminates all momentum profits. Further, our political sensitivity based factor explains 25% (40%) of monthly stock (industry) momentum alphas. Collectively, our results suggest that investor underreaction to political information generates momentum in stock and industry returns.

Download or read book Essays in Household Finance written by Morteza Momeni and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Household Finance written by Ricardo Cunha and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: