IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/anr/refeco/v1y2009p227-248.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Consumer Finance

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Tufano

    (Harvard Business School, National Bureau of Economic Research, and Doorways to Dreams Fund, Inc. Boston, Massachusetts 02163)

Abstract

Although consumer finance is a substantial element of the economy, it has had a smaller footprint within financial economics. In this review, I suggest a functional definition of the subfield of consumer finance, focusing on four key functions: payments, risk management, moving funds from today to tomorrow (saving/investing), and from tomorrow to today (borrowing). I provide data showing the economic importance of consumer finance in the American economy. I propose a historical explanation for its relative lack of attention by financial economists and in business school curricula based on historic geographic and gender splits between business and consumer studies. I review the literature in consumer finance, organized by its focus on the consumer, financial institutions, and the government. This work is spread out between economics, marketing, psychology, sociology, technology, and public policy. Finally, I suggest a number of open research questions.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Tufano, 2009. "Consumer Finance," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 227-247, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:anr:refeco:v:1:y:2009:p:227-248
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.financial.050808.114457
    Download Restriction: Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marianna Brunetti & Elena Giarda & Costanza Torricelli, 2016. "Is Financial Fragility a Matter of Illiquidity? An Appraisal for Italian Households," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 62(4), pages 628-649, December.
    2. Disney, Richard & Gathergood, John, 2013. "Financial literacy and consumer credit portfolios," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(7), pages 2246-2254.
    3. Fligstein, Neil & Goldstein, Adam, 2012. "The Emergence of a Finance Culture in American Households, 1989-2007," Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Working Paper Series qt6vp6p588, Institute of Industrial Relations, UC Berkeley.
    4. Gathergood, John, 2012. "Self-control, financial literacy and consumer over-indebtedness," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 590-602.
    5. Dimitris Georgarakos & Roman Inderst, 2011. "Financial Advice and Stock Market Participation," BCL working papers 51, Central Bank of Luxembourg.
    6. Anderson, Laurel & Ostrom, Amy L. & Corus, Canan & Fisk, Raymond P. & Gallan, Andrew S. & Giraldo, Mario & Mende, Martin & Mulder, Mark & Rayburn, Steven W. & Rosenbaum, Mark S. & Shirahada, Kunio & W, 2013. "Transformative service research: An agenda for the future," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(8), pages 1203-1210.
    7. Benjamin J. Keys & Tomasz Piskorski & Amit Seru & Vincent Yao, 2014. "Mortgage Rates, Household Balance Sheets, and the Real Economy," NBER Working Papers 20561, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Bergerès, Anne-Sophie & d'Astous, Philippe & Dionne, Georges, 2015. "Is there any dependence between consumer credit line utilization and default probability on a term loan? Evidence from bank-customer data," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 276-286.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    household finance; personal finance; consumer behavior; behavioral economics; behavioral finance; retail financial institutions; functional perspective;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:anr:refeco:v:1:y:2009:p:227-248. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: http://www.annualreviews.org (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.annualreviews.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.