Dvara Research’s Household Finance Research initiative aims to rigorously understand the financial choices and decisions of low-income or excluded individuals and households, and their relation to achieving households’ objectives. It has been our consistent endeavour to study financial inclusion as a gateway to a suite of appropriate financial services eventually enabling well-rounded household balance sheets and consumer financial well-being.
Head - Household Finance
Senior Research Associate
Gold dominates household portfolios in India. This has been labelled as irrational behaviour by financially illiterate households. In this paper, we show that household preference towards gold is not irrational in the context of the Indian financial and macroeconomic environment which includes high inflation, financial repression, and capital controls.
The pandemic-led economic crisis has exacerbated the rising indebtedness among India's poor households, and could push more families into a debt trap
There is an urgent need to make formal financial services more flexible, and customer centric, in order to increase its usability
In this blog post-through a case study, we analyse how microcredit borrowers availed the debt moratarium and through that identify how much they may have been impacted by COVID-19 and lockdowns.
he microfinance movement in India is set to receive another dose of impetus with the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) recently released Consultative Document on Regulation of Microfinance in June 2021. Following the Malegam Committee Report, which is a decade old now, the current document looks to reassess and realign the priorities of the sector.
This brief reviews the literature on the finances of platform workers in India and around the world.
In this paper, we document some key relationships between micro-level household behavior and macro-level aggregates for the Indian economy. Using the CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Survey, we show that for the period 2014-19, the household-level savings rate around the median of the income distribution correlates strongly with, and has predictive power for, macro-aggregate variables such as the Wholesale Price Index and its rate of change, the Prime Lending Rate, the growth rate of bank credit for personal loans, the growth rate of industry-sector GDP, and the growth rate of bank credit to the household sector.
In this deck, we analyse the financial portfolios of Indian households adhering to different religious faiths
In this paper, we create and validate a composite demand-side financial inclusion index to contribute to the literature on the measurement of financial inclusion
In this post, we explore how the households’ surplus changed during the nationwide lockdown imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19
In all our research efforts, we strive to maintain an independent voice that speaks for the low-income household and household enterprises. Our ability to perform this function is significantly enhanced by our commitment to disseminate as a pure public good, all the intellectual capital that we create.
