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Briefing
Digital, Financial, and Health Insurance Exclusion Experienced by Low-Income Households
Many low-income households are excluded from essential services such as home internet access, bank accounts, and health insurance coverage. We examine to what degree low-income households experience digital, financial, and health insurance exclusion and assess whether education and race are correlated with exclusion. We find that more than 10 percent of low-income households experienced multiple types of exclusion in 2019, with more pronounced results for households with lower educational attainment.
Working Paper
Optimal Monetary Policy in an Open Emerging Market Economy
The majority of households across emerging market economies are excluded from the financial markets and cannot smooth consumption. I analyze the implications of this for optimal monetary policy and the corresponding choice of domestic versus external nominal anchor in a small open economy framework with nominal rigidities, aggregate uncertainty and financial exclusion. I find that, if set optimally, monetary policy smooths the consumption of financially excluded agents by stabilizing their income. Even though Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation targeting approximates optimal monetary policy ...
Discussion Paper
The ‘Banking Desert’ Mirage
Unbanked households are often imagined to live in urban neighborhoods devoid of banks, but is that really the case? Our map of U.S. banking deserts reveals that most are not in urban areas, where financial exclusion may be endemic, but in actual deserts?largely in the sparsely populated, rural West. Across states, we find that the share of the population in a banking desert is unrelated to the share that is unbanked. If distance from a bank is not what causes financial exclusion, then motivating banks to locate closer to the unbanked may not promote financial inclusion.