Research

My research is in the areas of social finance and behavioural finance.

Social finance refers to financial activities, investments, and strategies that aim to achieve social and environmental goals alongside financial returns. My domain of specialisation is microfinance, i.e. the delivering of financial services to the unbanked people, typically low-income populations in developing countries. Microfinance aims to improve poor people’s livelihoods, to overcome poverty and to empower individuals, particularly women and marginalised groups.

My research in microfinance uses insights from behavioural economics. Economic agents display psychological limitations and anomalies, such as temptation, overconfidence, and inattention. Behavioural economics studies how human psychology interacts with economic decision-making. Interestingly, the literature finds that behavioural anomalies are particularly intense among poor populations. This makes behavioural theories crucial to shed light on the financial lives of poor people. And vice versa, looking at how the poor manage their money, we can test behavioural theories and clarify how human psychology interacts with individual financial choices.

My research tries to elucidate the impact of behavioural anomalies on agents’ borrowing and savings decision-making. From there, I study the design of banking contracts in the presence of agents having behavioural anomalies. I explore questions related to contract design: moral hazard, screening with asymmetric information, pricing, etc.. I explore these questions among poor and rich households.

You may be interested to look a my publications.