Many college and university 403(b) plans restrict the menu of investment choices to funds offered by TIAA-CREF, the current manager of over half of all 403(b) contributions. Further, in the face of Internal Revenue Code changes that will take effect in 2006 and will make 403(b) plan ERISA...

Financial innovation in the form of new delivery channels, products, and providers has helped push out the frontier of access to finance and thus increase the bankable and banked population. Mobile money and crowdfunding platforms are prime examples for this. The same financial innovation has...

We study the determinants of borrowers' default in P2P lending with a new data set consisting of 70,673 loan observations from Lending Club. Previous research identified a number of default determining variables but did not distinguish between different loan risk levels. We define four loan risk...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Retirees confront the difficult problem of how to manage their money in retirement so as to not outlive their funds while continuing to invest in capital markets. We posit a dynamic utility maximizer who makes both asset location and allocation decisions when managing her retirement financial...

This study empirically analyses the influence of tax concessions on decisions regarding retirement savings in Austria. We analyse real decisions on retirement savings by using qualitative data. This allows us to examine how different, perceived decision-making criteria have led to actual...

This paper examines the extent to which savings products offered by cooperative societies in some parts of Nigeria meet the financial needs of the rural dwellers. The study used the data from interviews and focus group discussions from randomly selected members of cooperative societies in six...

Financialization of households is a result of the growing role of financial systems and instruments in the economy. The increased role of financial phenomena in financial and non-financial decisions taken by households is not proportional to capabilities of their perception and understanding by...

Government leaders around the world are designing national strategies to improve financial inclusion for populations traditionally excluded from the financial markets. Financial literacy is a key tool being used to bring economically vulnerable populations into the financial mainstream. Data...

Transaction costs impose a barrier to savings, but lowering them may have smaller impacts than expected due to other constraints, such as psychological biases. Within the context of retirement savings under defined contributions in the privatized pension system in Mexico, we analyze two...