National Council of Applied Economic Research
Prof Tarun Ramadorai (University of Oxford and NCAER) presented on Cross-country Trends in Household Finance at this NCAER Seminar. Dr Pallavi Choudhuri from NCAER shared her views as the discussant for the seminar.
Household finance studies the ways in which households use financial instruments to attain their objectives. The field has grown rapidly in recent years, with considerable emphasis on anomalies—household financial behavior that deviates from the prescriptions of standard finance theory in ways that are hard to rationalize—and on the characteristics of households and of the financial systems in which they operate that either exacerbate or mitigate such mistakes. Cross-country studies of household finance have added substantially to individual country studies enabling a systematic comparison of household finance practices around the world. Ramadorai reviewed the literature on international comparative household finance and discussed what the aggregate household balance sheets for 13 countries reveal. Based on work done jointly with Cristian Badarinza and John Campbell, Ramadorai highlighted common features and contrasts across countries and discuss key issues surrounding retirement savings, investments in risky assets, unsecured debt, and mortgages. He also focused on research from India in this rapidly growing area of work.
He is Professor of Financial Economics at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at NCAER. He is also an Executive Committee member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, Senior Academic Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research, Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and Honorary Advisor to the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. He has served as an Economic Advisor to the European Securities and Markets Authority, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India during 2011 and 2012. His research focuses on asset pricing, international finance, household finance, and the Indian economy. Ramadorai has a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard and an MPhil in Economics from Cambridge.
