Call for Research Proposals on Household Finance in India

Call for Research Proposals on Household Finance in India

The Household Finance Research Initiative at Dvara Research is announcing a call for research proposals on key themes and issues pertaining to Household Finance in India in collaboration with Northern Arc Capital, Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at IIT-Madras and Omidyar Network.

The initiative invites research institutions/think-tanks, institutional and independent academicians, and scholars to submit research proposals that thematically cut across various dimensions of financial inclusion and household finance research.

The initiative aims to generate high-quality evidence-based research, fund projects under the themes of household finance and build a robust body of work that will educate, encourage and facilitate policymakers and practitioners to address the gaps in existing financial products and services targeted towards low-income households.

The key objective of the research conducted under this initiative is to devote intellectual capital to solving critical challenges in the design and delivery of financial services that increase financial access, facilitates socio-economic mobility and ultimately improves the well-being of households in India.

The research emerging out of this initiative will be disseminated at the Household Finance Conference hosted by Dvara Research, scheduled for April 2021.

Themes

Researchers may apply for the research grant under either of the research themes, listed below.

These themes are carefully curated to address the current challenges that exist in the field of household finance.

They also present a list of research questions that can be explored under each of these themes.

Please note that this is only an indicative list of issues and researchers can develop their own research questions pertinent to these themes.

Understanding financial decisions that households make and strategies they adopt to achieve their objectives:

This theme seeks to generate a richer understanding of financial and non-financial strategies that households adopt in order to achieve their financial goals, without isolating them from the institutional context they operate in.

A household’s financial life can be viewed as a combination of exposure to time and contingent states.

The core role of financial services in the lives of households is to help them manage and increase their consumption smoothly by the movement of resources across time and manage risks by the movement of resources across contingent states and spaces.

It is essential to observe, identify and rigorously study the interactions between household and financial decisions, given the complex nature of households’ financial needs and the deviation from optimal allocation of a household portfolio.

Research under this theme is expected to provide insights into missing or inefficient markets that inhibit the effective achievement of public policy objectives.

This could include, for instance, the development of deeper insights into the link between lack of access to financial savings and investment options and household ownership of physical assets.

Potential research question/topic under this theme includes (but is not limited to):