Household Finance WS2023-24

This course presents topics on the area of Household Finance, on the interface between Macroeconomics and Finance. This is not only an active area of frontier academic research, but also interesting and useful to people working in the financial sector, including central banks. The broad overall theme of the topics presented is household wealth management, namely analysis of household demand for assets and for loans.

The course should appeal to a wide range of students, from those interested in understanding household preferences for financial products useful for financial sector jobs, to those who are more academically oriented and who want to study intertemporal portfolio selection in the face of labor income risk for which one cannot buy insurance.

An explicit aim of the course is to stress the intuition behind the results and to provide students with basic understanding of key findings in recent, mostly empirical but also computational and experimental, research on household portfolios. The lectures will be supplemented by classes (two hours every two weeks), which will present useful econometric and other relevant techniques and provide hands-on-practice in data analysis using the STATA econometric package.