Speaker: Tarun Ramadorai, Professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College London

Time: 10:00-11:00 a.m., October 17, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: Room 420, National School of Development (Chengze Garden Campus), Peking University (Please scan the QR code before 16:00 p.m. October 16th, a confirmation message/Email will be sent upon successful registration)

Abstract:

Households are pivotal decision-makers in financial markets. Their savings decisions lead to direct or indirect investments in financial markets, and they are the ultimate owners of productive enterprises in the economy. They take borrowing decisions on loans from financial institutions, they pay taxes to finance the government, and they receive enormous transfers during crises like the pandemic. Despite their central importance to academia, policy, and practice, households have been under-studied, particularly in financial economics.

Unprecedented access to granular data, increasingly sophisticated behavioural economics models, and new data science tools are transforming our quest to unearth the structure beneath the surface of personal finance markets. We are learning how households respond to financial constraints and financial incentives, what households believe about future financial outcomes, and the shape of households’ preferences over financial choices. This knowledge underpins policies to ameliorate income and wealth inequality and is helping us harness technology to democratize personal finance.

Professor Tarun Ramadorai has been at the forefront of research in this area, as well as in implementing these ideas in economic and regulatory policy. His work develops new analytical approaches to extract insights from extraordinarily large and rich data on household financial decisions from a broad set of countries around the world, including many major emerging and advanced economies.

Professor Tarun Ramadorai’s lecture will outline the state of play in household finance research and discuss how this work is re-orienting the study of financial economics. He will outline what these academic insights teach us about the drivers of inequality of financial wealth and how they can lead to the productive use of technology in financial markets.

Biography:

Professor Tarun Ramadorai has a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Williams College, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. Prior to his role at Imperial, he spent over a decade at the University of Oxford.

Professor Tarun Ramadorai is an Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, one of the three premier global journals in financial economics. He is a Director of the European Finance Association, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Senior Academic Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research (ABFER), and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). His research has won numerous academic best paper awards, and it has frequently been featured in news outlets such as the Economist, the Financial Times, CNBC, and the BBC. He has been invited to give over 20 keynote speeches including for the Society for Financial Studies, the Danish Finance Institute, the Bank of England, the University of Cambridge, Singapore Management University, the Reserve Bank of India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and the Indian Institute of Technology.

Source: National School of Development