David Laibson is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He leads Harvard Universityʼs Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative. Laibsonʼs research focuses on the topic of behavioral economics, with emphasis on household finance, macroeconomics, aging, and intertemporal choice. Laibson is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he co-directs the National Institute of Aging Roybal Center for Behavior Change in Health and Savings, and is a Research Associate in the Aging, Asset Pricing, and Economic Fluctuations Working Groups. Laibson serves on the Board of the Russell Sage Foundation and on Harvardʼs Pension Investment Committee. Laibson serves on the advisory board of the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium and has served on the Academic Research Council of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Laibson is a recipient of a Marshall Scholarship. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. Laibson holds degrees from Harvard University (AB in Economics, Summa), the London School of Economic (MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD in Economics). He received his PhD in 1994 and has taught at Harvard since then. In recognition of his teaching, he has been awarded Harvardʼs ΦΒΚ Prize and a Harvard College Professorship.
David T. Robinson is a Professor of Finance and the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Professor of International Management at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of private equity, venture capital and entrepreneurial finance. His work has appeared in leading academic journals in finance and economics and has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and The Economist.
Professor Robinson is a scientific advisor to the Swedish House of Finance in Stockholm, Sweden, the Private Equity Research Council, the Private Capital Research Institute, as well as a number of private equity firms and technology startups. He is the former Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Private Capital.
He earned his PhD and MBA degrees at the University of Chicago, a Master of Science from the London School of Economics, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics. Prior to joining Duke University he was a Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University.
While most corporations embrace environmental and social responsiblity as a key component of their corporate strategy, no work to date has explored whether households understand the tradeoffs that they face when they invest in stocks that purport to be socially responsible. We conduct a large scale survey of Swedish households to measure how much they understand about the science behind environmental impact, their financial literacy, as well as their self-awareness in these matters. Connecting their results to their actual retirement savings decisions, we can link actual and perceived environmental and financial literacy to the tendency to make “green” investment choices.
Dr. Gauri Kartini Shastry is a development economist whose work focuses on three areas: education, nutrition, and financial decision-making. These three aspects of what economists call “human capital” are essential to improving the well-being of poor households, both in developed and developing countries. These research areas are also connected by common empirical techniques to identify causal relationships.
One focus of her research relates to how household decisions, such as whether to enroll in school, responded to the growth in job opportunities for English-speaking workers in India in the 1990s. A second research area focuses on child nutrition in South Asia. For example, in one paper, she studies how mothers in Bangladesh responded to concerns about arsenic-contaminated well-water by breastfeeding their infants longer and delaying supplementary feeding. Infant health improved. Combining her interests in education and nutrition, Dr. Shastry has studied school meals programs in India. In recent work on this topic, she is evaluating a field experiment that fortified school meals and monitored meals intensively to improve program implementation.
Lastly, another research direction asks whether financial education can be effective in improving the financial decisions people make, such as how much to save. Dr. Shastry examines this question in very different contexts evaluating different types of interventions, such as high school courses in the United States, mandatory workshops for gold-mine workers in South Africa and peer-based savings clubs among domestic workers in Singapore.
Dr. Shastry is currently an Associate Professor of Economics at Wellesley College where she has been working since 2009, prior to which she was at the University of Virginia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Development Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
Dr. Shastry received her master’s and doctorate degrees in Economics from Harvard University in 2008 and her bachelor’s degree in Economics and Mathematics from Brown University in 2002.
Andrea Hasler is an Assistant Research Professor in Financial Literacy at GFLEC. She holds a Ph.D. in Finance as well as a M.Sc. and B.A. in Business and Economics from the University of Basel. Her dissertation was on households’ financial decisions and retirement planning. During her doctorate, she spent two years at NYU Stern conducting research. Moreover, she has been teaching for five years as a lecturer at the University of Basel. Her previous professional experience includes the development of an advanced studies online course in financial market theory and the provision of global equity market research as research analyst.
This project examines financial fragility in the United States, which is measured as individuals’ ability to cope with unexpected expenses. Using data from the 2015 National Financial Capability Study and the 2015 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, we identify subgroups of the U.S. population that are most financially fragile. We observe widespread fragility across the entire population – more than one third of Americans are financially fragile. Several years after the financial crisis, financial fragility is not only pervasive, but many middle-income households also suffer from the inability to deal with shocks. Our measure captures several factors that contribute to financial fragility, including lack of assets and indebtedness. The quantitative findings are also supported by qualitative data from focus group interviews. We explore the long-term implications of being financially fragile and its effects on retirement planning – individuals who are fragile in the short term may end up being financially insecure in the long term as well. Our findings point to the need to incentivize short-term savings in a way that is complementary to the institutionalized mechanisms of saving for retirement and other long-term goals. Focus groups also complement our empirical findings regarding the need and benefits of improving financial literacy to make individuals less financially fragile.
Fiona Greig is the Director of Consumer Research for the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Previously, Fiona served as the Deputy Budget Director for the City of Philadelphia from 2012 through 2014 and as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, Fiona was a consultant at McKinsey & Company for five years, consulting public and social sector clients on strategy, operations and economic development.
In 2009 Fiona started and ran Bank on DC, a financial inclusion program for the District of Columbia. She has published on economic and public health topics in journals such as the American Economic Review and AIDS and Behavior. Fiona was named a Rising Talent by The Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University.
Amar Hamoudi is a Senior Researcher within the Consumer research vertical at the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Prior to joining JPMCI, he was Head of Pricing and Acquisition Modeling at OnDeck Capital, the leading alternative small business lender in the United States. Prior to serving at OnDeck, Amar spent 15 years in academic research on family economics, family demography, and consumer behavior. His most recent academic appointment was Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. As a faculty member, he taught and researched topics in strategic policy design, microeconomics, econometrics, and demography.
Amar earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University, a Masters’ Degree in International Development (MPAID) from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Adair Morse is Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches New Venture Finance. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Michigan. Adair’s research spans multiple areas of finance: household finance, governance, FinTech, Impact Investing, and asset management, with the unifying theme that she tries to choose topics useful for leveling economic playing fields. Her publications appear in the top economics and finance journals, and she has won a number of top finance research prizes, including the Brattle Prize, the Jensen Prize, the European Finance Association Asset Management Prize, the Sonoran Finance Conference Prize, the China International Finance Conference Prize, the WFA Prize, and the Moskowitz Impact prize, and her various works have been directly implemented into policy. Within household finance, Adair has a particular interest in household debt and welfare, studying low and middle income credit products and their use via both observational studies and field experiments with companies. Her recent work studies many aspects of marketplace lending/crowdfunding. The latest piece asks whether platform lenders ameliorate discrimination because they do not involve facial contact or induces more discrimination in lending with statistical discrimination via big dat. Examples of Adair’s other noteworthy publications in household finance include work on the effect of income inequality on consumption and disclosure in financial services.
Racial discrimination in lending can materialize in loan officer decisions or in algorithmic scoring, especially with big-data use by FinTech lenders. To investigate these discrimination channels, we estimate a treatment-based Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition based on the unique mortgage-default-risk setting of the GSEs. Overall, we estimate that lenders reject African-American and Hispanic applicants 5% more often, leaving money on the table. Discrimination in rejection rates is especially pronounced among low-credit-score applicants, but less pronounced for FinTech lenders. Among approved loans, ethnic-minority borrowers pay higher rates of interest, with both traditional and FinTech lenders charging non-white borrowers 0.08% higher interest for purchase mortgages and 0.03% higher for refinance mortgages. Our results point to lenders extracting rents in weaker competitive environments such as financial deserts. In aggregate, ethnic-minority borrowers pay almost $0.5B per year in extra interest. Finally, we document that the GSEs play a crucial role in minimizing algorithmic discrimination.
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
The George Washington University
Science and Engineering Hall, B1270
George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 652
The George Washington University
Science and Engineering Hall, B1270