Household Finance

The department Household Finance conducts research on the financial decisions of private households and the interplay between the supply of and the demand for financial services. The research projects in this area are united by the overarching goal of developing solutions that lead to better financial decisions by households. In addition to the microeconomic perspective, the department also follows a macroeconomic perspective, for example concerning the design of pension systems as a determinant of both the depth and width of capital markets and long-term wealth formation in the household sector of an economy.

An important topic on which the Leibniz Institute SAFE is also conducting research is the transformation to a green economy. The current project “ClimLabels: Transition labels in climate finance” in the area of Household Finance, together with the Universities of Bochum and Münster, and the sustainable think tank Climate & Company, is developing a new type of quality label to help investors identify companies that are pursuing a reliable and ambitious transformation path to achieving climate neutrality.

Recently, Christine Laudenbach and her team received third-party funding for the project “The Gender Wealth Gap: Participation in Financial Markets” through the Leibniz Programme for Women Professors. “The focus of our project addresses the gender wealth gap and the different activities of women and men in financial markets. Both are well-documented phenomena, so the data allow us to conclude the likely causes of women’s low participation in financial market activity. We want to use these findings to analyze whether, and if so, what possibilities there are to overcome the problem,” explains Christine Laudenbach. The news update can be found here.