This post is for Queens College students who are interested in studying household finance as a thesis or independent study. It explains what the field covers, why it’s worth studying, and how to get started.
What is Household Finance
Studying household finance involves researching people’s money situation: what they earn, spend, own, and owe. We use people’s financial records to make inferences about how society is organized and how economic life works.
Why Study It?
There are practical and intellectual reasons for studying household finance.
For practical matters: Several major industries in metro New York City are strongly interested in people’s money, particularly finance and marketing. Your interest and substantive knowledge of household finances may not be enough to land a dream job on its own, but it is an interesting area of expertise that you can incorporate into your professional repertoire. Every little bit counts when competing for desirable jobs.
On intellectual matters: Household finance is space where quantifying important concepts like “inequality”, “wellbeing”, or “poverty” is comparatively straightforward and amenable to quantitative analysis. This amenability to quantitative analysis allows us to think in shades of gray, and in a fox-not-hedgehog-type style that is characteristic of the pragmatic empiricism for which we advocate in the Data Analytics program.
Our Role in the Literature
There are many ways to contribute to a discussion or decision-making process. Your training imparts technical knowledge that allows you to use data to generate and assess factual propositions (i.e., descriptions of how the world is, rather than opinions of how it ought to be). In our sphere of professional competency (describing household finances), our contribution is to push discussion towards one that is premised on a universe of factual propositions that agree with the data.
Narrow Your Focus
The field of household finances is very large for a single thesis. You must narrow your focus to:
A particular facet of households’ finances. Choose some facet of income, expenditures, assets, and debts. See below for more.
- Income: Money flowing into a household from work, investment returns, government assistance, interpersonal assistance, business profits, etc. The Survey of Consumer Finances and Panel Study of Income Dynamics are two recommended sets.
- Expenditures: Money flowing out of a household, except investments. The Consumer Expenditure Survey is the best source of U.S. households.
- Assets: Owned property that can be redeemed for money, like a house or investment account. The SCF is the best available source, particularly for high-wealth households.
- Debt: Money owed by the household, like mortgages, student debt, or credit card debt. The SCF is the best available source.
A particular group. You might be interested in the economic circumstances surrounding people who pertain to a particular group or find themselves in a common circumstance. For example, you might be interested in how the personal finances of single people differ from those of married ones, or male-headed households differ from female-headed ones, and so forth.
Studying Household Finance at QC MADASR
A household finance thesis might be a good option for a student who is interested in pursuing professional work in fields that engage marketing, finance, or economics. I do supervise theses on these topics, but require that students meet with me to ensure that this type of work is both practical and fits in their career strategy. To schedule a meeting, contact me at [email protected].
