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Journal Article
The Accounts of the Unbanked and Underbanked
We conducted focus groups with financially underserved Americans to learn more about how they manage their money. We spoke with 36 unbanked and underbanked individuals in Houston, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, about how they make and receive payments, the challenges they encounter in managing their finances, and how these experiences shape their views of financial service providers. While several participants described negative experiences with bank fees and concerns about security vulnerabilities, they acknowledged that alternative financial service providers were not always adequate ...
Working Paper
Is Money Essential? An Experimental Approach
Working Paper
Beyond Banks: Trust Among the Financially Underserved
In 2023, over 18 percent of US households were either unbanked or underbanked, a group commonly referred to as financially underserved (e.g., see Burhouse, Navarro and Osaki (2016)). Prior work and survey evidence identify a lack of broad-scope trust in banks as an important reason for financial exclusion (e.g., FDIC (2024), Falcettoni and Nygaard (2025), and Xu (2020)). Yet it is not clear whether this mistrust is unique to banks or whether it extends to other institutions, such as government entities or nonbank providers of account services. This distinction matters for policymakers when ...
Working Paper
Bargaining Under Liquidity Constraints: Nash vs. Kalai in the Laboratory
We report on an experiment in which buyers and sellers engage in semi-structured bargaining in two dimensions: how much of a good the seller will produce and how much money the buyer will offer the seller in exchange. Our aim is to evaluate the empirical relevance of two axiomatic bargaining solutions, the generalized Nash bargaining solution and Kalai's proportional bargaining solution. These bargaining solutions predict different outcomes when buyers are constrained in their money holdings. We first use the case when the buyer is not liquidity constrained to estimate the bargaining power ...