Arna Olafs­son

An overarching goal of my research is to understand the traits and circumstances that influence the financial choices of individuals and households and how they use financial instruments, markets, and information to achieve their objectives. In my work, I carefully combine econometrics with consideration of economic theory to address fundamental questions within finance and economics - coupled with natural experiment designs, regression techniques, and experiments - to identify causal effects, a key component to effective policy design and decision making. In my work, I study, e.g., why men and women make different financial choices, what determines how inflation expectations are translated into real-world financial choices, how the introduction of new financial technology influences financial decision making, and what drives the demand for high-cost consumer credit.