Household Finance

Abstract

Households are one of the key participants in the economy. Households provide land, labor, and capital to the external economy, in exchange for incomes including rents, wages, interests, and profits; the incomes are then utilized to buy goods and services from the external economy again, rendering an income flow circular. This suggests that households make complicated decisions in almost all areas of economics and finance, which constitute the scope of household finance studies. Specifically, household finance encompasses the following three topics: (a) how households make financial decisions regarding saving, consumption, investment, housing, and borrowing; (b) how organizations provide goods and services to satisfy these financial functions; and (c) how external interventions (from firms, governments, or other parties) such as financial technology (FinTech) affect these financial activities. Despite the important stake in the financial system, it was not until recent decades that household finance became a prosperous research field. For many years, financial studies mostly focused on financial markets, nonfinancial corporations, and financial institutions and intermediaries, with households being delivered as a simplified representative agent. Classical economic models do consider households in the economic system, but mainly focus on their functions in the income flow circular (i.e., the saving or demand for products). Recently, the household finance field received more attention and has produced a large strand of theoretical and empirical studies due to the incremental participation of households in financial markets, the observed consequences of events such as financial crises, the availability of more detailed high-quality granular data, and the regulations and interventions induced by technology innovation.