Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2025

FinTech as a Financial Liberator

Greg BUCHAK, Jiayin HU, Shang-Jin WEI
Interest rate caps on household savings are a common form of financial repression in developing countries and typically benefit banks at the expense of households. Using proprietary data from a leading Chinese FinTech company, we investigate FinTech’s role in alleviating financial repression throu...
Keywords: FinTech, digital payments, fast payments, bank deposits, money market funds, ceiling regulation, financial repression
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2025

Rigid Mortgage Rates and Monetary Policy Transmission

Zhenyu GAO, Wenxi JIANG, Haohan REN, Kemin WANG, Yuezhi WU
During the 2019–2024 monetary easing cycle, Chinese households used their savings to prepay unprecedented amounts of mortgage loans. Mortgage rates remained rigid due to banks’ market power and refinancing restrictions, while savings returns quickly adjusted to rate cuts. The widening gap betwee...
Keywords: mortgage prepayments, mortgage rate rigidity, monetary policy, household consumption
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2025

Poverty Spreads in Deposit Markets

Emilio BISETTI, Arkodipta SARKAR
This paper documents a source of financial inequality: banks offer significantly lower deposit interest rates and product variety to the poor. These poverty spreads in deposit markets are substantial - moving from the bottom to the top income decile increases deposit rates by 55% of the median rate ...
Keywords: poverty spreads, deposit products, inequality, participation
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2025

Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates

Daniel L. GREENWALD, Matteo LEOMBRONI, Hanno LUSTIG, Stijn VAN NIEUWERBURGH
Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. We investigate how much of the increase in measured financial wealth inequality can be accounted for by the decline in rates, and study the implications for inequality in total wealth (li...
Keywords: wealth inequality, interest rates, secular stagnation, human wealth, duration
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Annual Conference

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Real Estate and Urban Economics

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May 2025

Cracking Down, Pricing Up: Housing Supply in the Wake of Mass Deportation

Troup HOWARD, Mengqi WANG, Dayin ZHANG
US housing markets have faced a secular shortage of housing supply in the past decade, contributing to a steady decline in housing affordability. Most supply-side explanations in the literature have tended to focus on the distortionary effect of local housing regulations. This paper provides novel e...
Keywords: Housing Supply, Construction, Home Price, Immigration, Mass Deportation
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