Benedict Guttman-Kenney

Academic Research Page, Policy Research Page, Presentations Page

 News

I will be presenting my working paper, that studies the implications of removing information on missed payments in consumer credit reports during natural disasters, at the NYU Stern Climate Finance Conference on 23 May.

I recently released a new working paper studying immigration and consumer credit in America. I will be presenting my research at the Federal Reserve Board's Applied Microeconomics seminar on 30 June, at the Leibniz Institute for Finance Research SAFE Household Finance Workshop on 10-11 July, and at the University of Edinburgh's Credit Scoring and Credit Control Conference on 27–29 August.

I will be presenting an updated version of my working paper, studying the effects of a Quebec government policy that restricts credit card repayment choices, at the Boulder Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making on 28–30 May and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Consumer Finance Institute seminar on 9 September.

In June, I will be discussing papers at the University of Michigan Ross 8th Mitsui Symposium: New Frontiers in Financial Intermediation and at the Western Finance Association.

In May, I presented my behavioral research, studying how consumers respond to gas (petrol) price changes, at the Behavioral Science & Policy Association Conference.

In April, I spoke with Yahoo! Finance about retirement savings decisions following the recent stock market crash. In March, I was on Houston Public Media's Houston Matters radio show speaking about payday lending (I'm on about 17 minutes in). In February, I chatted with NPR Marketplace about households' emergency savings. At the end of 2024, Yahoo! Finance covered my research on why information on how much you pay on your credit card is missing from your US credit report. 

In March, my credit card research: The Semblance of Success in Nudging Consumers to Pay Down Credit Card Debt was published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (Open Access link). This paper has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Yahoo! Finance. Summarized in Chicago Booth Review Article and also covered in various blogs (1) (2) (3) (4).

Last September, my paper on consumer credit reporting data was published in the Journal of Economic Literature. This paper reviews the economics of the data and includes practical guidance for researchers on how to use these datasets.

 Background

Before moving to Chicago for my Ph.D., I spent six years conducting economic research informing financial regulation at the UK Financial Conduct Authority, Bank of England, and Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I am a graduate of the University of Warwick and University College London. While studying for my Ph.D., I received the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Consumer Finance Dissertation Fellowship for my research. My research spans the academic fields of household finance, behavioral economics/finance, and FinTech. I have studied a variety of aspects of household finances including buy now pay later (BNPL), credit cards, credit files, and payday loans. In my research I study large datasets of granular household finances to understand consumer and firm behaviors, often using econometric methodologies to estimate the causal effects, and have run field experiments (RCTs) with lenders to test the effects of policies.

Media coverage includes The New York Times, The Financial Times (1 - weekend lead `big read') (2 - FT Tech video) (3 - front page), Wall Street Journal (1) (2), Houston Public Media, NPR - National Public Radio (1) (2), Yahoo! Finance (1) (2) (3), Barron's, BBC, MarketWatch, Mashable, Fast Company, Raconteur, The Telegraph (1) (2), The FinTech Times, VoxEU/CEPR interview. 

My academic research has been published in leading finance, marketing, and economics journals with summaries in the Chicago Booth Review. For more information see my academic research page, CV, or Google Scholar.