Household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial system. We present an overview of the rapidly expanding literature on household finance (with some important exceptions) and suggest directions for future research. We...

We survey the household finance landscape in emerging economies. We first present statistics on household balance sheets from official micro-surveys in countries comprising 45% of the global population: China, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Thailand, and South Africa. We contrast these patterns...

Using the most recent wave of the AIDIS data, we describe and attempt to explain several important features of Indian household balance sheets. When compared with data on households in a range of developed and emerging economies, Indian households on average tend to hold a high fraction of...

This article reviews the literature on international comparative household finance. It presents summary statistics on household balance sheets for 13 developed countries and uses these statistics to discuss common features and contrasts across countries. It then discusses retirement savings,...

This paper reviews the literature on international comparative household finance. The paper presents summary statistics on household balance sheets for 13 developed countries, and uses these statistics to discuss common features and contrasts across countries. The paper then discusses retirement...

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological refinancing costs that inhibit refinancing until incentives are strong enough; and to behavior---potentially attributable to information-gathering costs---that lowers the probability that a household...

We build an empirical model to decompose delays in mortgage refinancing into time-dependent inaction (a low probability of responding to a refinancing incentive in a given quarter) and state- dependent inaction (a psychological addition to the financial cost of refinancing). We estimate the...