Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2026

From CeFi to DeFi: What Do Investors (Mis)Trust?

Shaokai DING, Wenzhi Dave DING, Chen LIN
A prevailing narrative of the rise of Bitcoin and decentralized finance (DeFi) is that they provide a “self-custody” solution to mitigate the misappropriation problem in the “institution-custody” model of centralized financial services (CeFi). The bankruptcy of the leading cryptocurrency exc...
Keywords: decentralized finance, Trust in finance, cryptocurrency, Cryptocurrency exchange, FTX
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2026

AI Copilots in Real Estate: Evidence from China

Lin William CONG, Xiang HUI, Yushan ZHOU
We study the effect of an AI copilot for financial intermediation, using data from China’s largest resale housing platform. Combining a neighborhood-level field experiment in one city and an exposure difference-in-differences design across 18 cities, we find that AI copilot access expedites real e...
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Housing Market, Financial Intermediation, Two-Sided Markets, Real Estate Agents
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2026

The Value of Mortgage Choice: Payment Structure and Contract Length

Michael BOUTROS, Nuno CLARA, Katya KARTASHOVA
We study how households choose between three mortgage contracts with different payment structures: fixed-rate fixed-payment, variable-rate variable-payment, and a hybrid variable-rate fixed-payment mortgage where interest rate changes affect principal repayment rather than payment size. This hybrid ...
Keywords: mortgage choice, household welfare, contract design
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2026

Private Innovation and Wealth Inequality

Mehran EBRAHIMIAN, Alexander LJUNGQVIST
Wealth inequality has risen sharply in recent decades. We study how restricted access to private-firm innovation contributes to this rise using a structural model of wealth accumulation with heterogeneous returns. Using a new long-run measure of innovation rents that includes both public and private...
Keywords: Wealth inequality, Private markets, Innovation rents, Return heterogeneity
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Annual Conference

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Household Finance

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May 2026

Housing Privatization as Intergenerational Redistribution

Kaiji CHEN, Hanming FANG, Yang TANG
In economies with temporary fast-growing wage incomes, housing purchase subsidy to initial cohorts can serve as an effective tool of redistribution from the future towards current generations. Using China’s housing reforms in the 1990s as a policy experiment, we show quantitatively that housing pu...
Keywords: Housing, Intergenerational redistribution, Capital gains, Social security
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