Household Finance across the Lifecycle

The fourth annual ISB-NBER conference on Economic Policy and the Indian Economy will be held at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad on December 13–14, 2025. The meeting will focus on household finance issues including saving and asset accumulation, borrowing and credit access, formal and informal financial markets, retirement finance, and intergenerational transfers. The meeting will be co-organized by Shilpa Aggarwal (ISB) and Amit Seru (Stanford University and NBER). 

Priority topics for discussion at the conference include, but are not limited to: 

• The determinants of household saving in both formal and informal settings, and the role of financial markets, including digital markets, in affecting saving behavior.
• Household access to credit markets, the disparities in credit access across different groups, and the role of credit in smoothing consumption and facilitating investments.
• Access to insurance and its implications for household behavior.
• The sources of economic security in retirement, including family transfers, private asset accumulation, and public programs.
• The determinants of ownership of real and financial assets, heterogeneity in ownership patterns by age, rural/urban, and other dimensions, and the trends in participation in asset ownership.
• Financial literacy and access to information about financial products.

The conference will spotlight research on the India and the South Asia region, but studies of other regions are also welcome, particularly when their findings have broad implications for issues in household finance. The organizers welcome submissions by scholars who are early in their careers and from those who are, and are not, NBER affiliates. To be considered for inclusion on the program, upload completed papers by 11:59pm (EDT) on Wednesday, June 25, 2025.

Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and that will be published by December 2025. In keeping with NBER requirements, papers may not make policy recommendations. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified in July, 2025.  For papers by author teams from outside India, ISB and NBER will provide a travel allowance approximately equal to business class airfare for one author per paper. All other co-authors are welcome to attend the conference at their own expense. For papers prepared by author teams based in India, the conference hosts will reimburse economy-class travel for all co-authors. ISB will cover conference-related lodging and meal expenses for all authors who attend the meeting.

Questions about subject matter may be addressed to shilpa_aggarwal@isb.edu or aseru@stanford.edu. Other conference-related questions may be directed to confer@nber.org. Please share this call for papers with colleagues who may be interested in submitting a paper