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Maria Vic­tor­ia Olesen

Ph.d. Fellow

Subjects
Finance Investment Savings Mortgage finance Interest rates Big data

Primary research areas

House­hold Fin­ance and Eco­nom­ic De­cision-Mak­ing
I am in­ter­ested in how house­holds make fin­an­cial de­cisions in re­sponse to chan­ging eco­nom­ic con­di­tions, in­clud­ing choices re­lated to con­sump­tion, sav­ings, debt, and hous­ing.
Mort­gage Mar­kets and Fin­an­cial In­sti­tu­tions
I am curi­ous about how mort­gage con­tract struc­tures and in­sti­tu­tion­al set­tings in­flu­ence house­hold be­ha­vi­or and fin­an­cial out­comes, es­pe­cially in the con­text of re­fin­an­cing and hous­ing mo­bil­ity.
Eco­no­met­rics and Big Data
I en­joy work­ing with large-scale data­sets and ap­ply­ing eco­no­met­ric tools to ana­lyze eco­nom­ic be­ha­vi­or and fin­an­cial mar­ket dy­nam­ics. My in­terests in­clude iden­ti­fic­a­tion strategies, pan­el data ana­lys­is, and fin­an­cial eco­no­met­rics across a wide range of top­ics.

I turn big data into in­sights about real-world de­cisions

I am particularly interested in how households and institutions respond to financial and policy changes. My academic work is grounded in the use of large-scale administrative datasets and econometric tools to uncover patterns in economic behavior.

I am especially motivated by questions of identification and causal inference, and I enjoy working with panel data. While my current work focuses on household finance and mortgage markets, my methodological interests span a broader range of topics in empirical finance.

Through my research, I aim to deepen our understanding of how economic structures and incentives shape household decision-making. 

Recent research projects

From Rates to Riches: How Dan­ish Homeown­ers Re­spond to In­terest Rate Shocks

with Dav­id Ber­ger, Jae­hun Jeong, Ju­lie Marx, and Fabrice Tourre

This pa­per in­vest­ig­ates the real ef­fects of a large, pos­it­ive net-worth shock ex­per­i­enced by Dan­ish fixed-rate mort­gage bor­row­ers in 2022, when rising long-term in­terest rates en­abled them to re­pur­chase their mort­gages at steep dis­counts.

Un­like U.S. FRMs, Dan­ish mort­gages al­low bor­row­ers to mon­et­ize cap­it­al gains when rates rise, cre­at­ing a unique set­ting to study house­hold re­sponses to large wealth shocks.

Us­ing high-qual­ity mi­crodata, we doc­u­ment that many house­holds re­fin­anced to cap­ture gains, re­du­cing debt or in­creas­ing con­sump­tion and in­vest­ments.

A struc­tur­al mod­el con­firms het­ero­gen­eous re­sponses across mort­gage types, high­light­ing the role of in­sti­tu­tion­al design in shap­ing mon­et­ary policy trans­mis­sion