Efficient diffusion of economic information plays a critical role in the functioning of society, and, more specifically, households. We study information diffusion between spouses in a representative sample of the German population. We focus on an important economic belief: the household's...

This paper considers asset holdings in rural Ethiopia. It shows that households own mostly non-financial assets and that the composition of asset portfolios varies significantly with the household’s overall wealth and its exposure to uncertainty. As regards the distribution of assets,...

The meltdown in residential real-estate prices that commenced in 2006 resulted in unprecedented mortgage delinquency rates. Until mid-2009, lenders and servicers pursued their own individual loss mitigation practices without being significantly influenced by government intervention. Using a...

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study in order to quantify the economy-wide monetary gains achieved by household-size economies due to within-household sharing of goods by individuals living in multimember households. In most countries out of the twenty countries we examine, we observe a...

This paper studies migration decisions of very poor households in an environment with a high level of violence. By matching detailed retrospective data on violence levels in Colombian rural municipalities with a household survey collected for the evaluation of the 'Familias en Acción' welfare...

We use micro data on young married households from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers in order to analyze the importance of borrowing constraints in Japan. We find (1) that 8 to 15 percent of young married Japanese households are borrowing-constrained, (2) that household assets and the...

Hurricane Harvey submerged over 25% of Houston in August 2017. Using a treatment intensity difference-in-difference design on consumer credit data, we find that average treatment effects of flooding mask substantial heterogeneity by initial financial well-being and homeownership status. Negative...

Households in low-and middle income countries (LMICs) derive income from a variety of sources. While a large body of evidence shows that households are not unitary decision-makers, the extent to which individual decision-making over different sources of household income affects consumption...

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...