Innovative Data in Household Finance: Opportunities and Challenges
To promote research on household finance, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Vanguard Group, will host a one-day conference in Cambridge, MA on Friday, December 8th, 2023. The meeting will be co-organized by NBER affiliates Pascal Noel (University of Chicago), Jialan Wang (University of Illinois) and Stephen P. Zeldes (Columbia University). There will be a Zoom option, but presenters are expected to attend in-person. The conference will also be live-streamed on YouTube.
The conference will focus on research using or creating innovative data in household finance. It will bring together influential researchers, government officials, and private sector leaders who are using and creating innovative data sets and building partnerships to advance research. Research papers employing any type of novel data are welcome. The organizers are particularly interested in research that explores implications of climate change for, and racial disparities in, household finance.
“Household finance” is defined broadly and includes:
• Household borrowing decisions, including decisions about debt in general and also specific types of credit, such as mortgages, credit cards, student loans, informal lending, marketplace lending, consumer default and bankruptcy, etc.
• Household saving and investing/portfolio-choice decisions, including both financial investments (ranging from short-term emergency savings to long-term retirement savings) and real investments (such as in housing and human capital)
• Household consumption, spending, and budgeting
• Household payment choices
• Insurance and other forms of household risk management
• Financial skills and capabilities
• The economics and industrial organization of the consumer financial services industry
• Fintech innovations related to consumer finance
• Climate change and household finance
• Laws, regulations, and public policies about consumer finance
• Proprietor and small business owner finance
To be considered for presentation, please upload papers along with a summary of at most one page describing the innovative data used in it, as a pdf file.
Submissions must be received by 11:59 pm EDT by Monday, October 9, 2023. Papers by researchers with and without NBER affiliations, by early career scholars, and by researchers from under-represented groups, are welcome. Please share this call for papers with other interested researchers. Authors of papers that are selected for the program will be notified by Thursday, October 26, 2023. Authors will only be contacted if their paper is selected.
The NBER has a zero-tolerance policy for any form of discrimination or harassment at both in-person and virtual meetings. All invitees will be required to agree and comply with the NBER Conference Code of Conduct.
Please direct administrative questions about this meeting to the NBER conference department (confer@nber.org). Other questions can be directed to the conference organizers.