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Louiza Bartzoka

Tenure Track Assistant Professor

Subjects
Finance Investment Savings Mortgage finance Interest rates

Primary research areas

Household Finance

Asset Pricing

Macroeconomics

Behavioral Finance

I examine how agents' beliefs and constraints impact their financial decisions.

I am a financial economist with research interests in household finance, asset pricing, macroeconomics and behavioral finance. I use structural methods, while finding new ways to leverage micro-data in model development and estimation.

My ongoing research pipeline is centered around two main areas of research: 1) the effect of household perceptions and expectations on household financial decisions, and 2) the effect of borrowing and liquidity constraints on households' financial decisions.

I received my Ph.D. in Finance from Imperial College Business School. During the Ph.D., I was a visiting student at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business for the Fall Quarter 2023 and an Intern at the Research Center of the Deutsche Bundesbank from July 2021 to January 2022.

Prior to starting the Ph.D., I worked as an Associate at JP Morgan in New York. I also hold a Master of Finance from the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Recent research projects

House Price Perceptions and the Housing Wealth Effect

In this paper, I determine the impact of household house price perceptions on the housing wealth effect. I build a structural model of consumption and housing with endogenous home ownership choice, where house price perceptions differ by home ownership status: renters are fully informed about house price changes, but owners are not. Along the cross-section of households, the MPCH is largest for owners who face the highest liquidity and debt constraints, as well as for renters who are most likely to want to purchase a home.
Latest Version

Gender Differences in Reactions to Income Shocks

Do women respond differently to income shocks than men? We use questions from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations that ask how women and men would adjust to an unexpected 10% change in income. Women are more likely to repay debt after an unexpected increase in income, where men have a larger marginal propensity to consume. When asked about how to buffer a decrease in income, both men and women report large reductions in spending, but women reduce spending more than men. Differences in debt adjustment are related to gender differences in the debt-to-income ratio, the degree of discouraged borrowing and liquidity constraints, where women are more likely to be constrained.
Latest Version

Credit Constraints and the Distributional Effects of the Refinancing Channel

The probability a household refinances their mortgage depends on both the likelihood a household applies for refinancing and the probability its application is approved by the recipient financial institution. This paper develops a model that identifies the household-level probability of approval separately from the application probability. The paper then investigates the distributional impact of credit constraints on the transmission of monetary policy through the mortgage refinancing channel in the U.S. economy, under normal or tightened credit standards. These findings reveal the households that are most negatively affected by credit constraints and thus in most need of streamlined refinancing programs.
Latest Version

Cross-Country Differences in Household Financial Decisions: A Structural Approach with Survey-Based Expectations

Household financial decisions and their subjective expectations about macroeconomic outcomes vary within and across countries and change over time according to the new Consumer Expectations Survey of the ECB. To rationalize the role of subjective expectations for financial decisions, we estimate a structural model in which households decide how much to save under their survey-reported subjective expectations about the macroeconomy.

Links

How has the pandemic affected household finances in developing economies?

Around the world, Covid-19 had exposed the fragility of households’ economic and financial wellbeing. Our evidence suggests that a large part of the world’s population have insufficient savings to weather an income shock. Indeed, financing an income shortfall for a period of three months would lead to a complete depletion of liquid financial assets for a third of households in our global sample.
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