Estudios de la Economía

[Copio este post de Erin Taylor en Charisma-Network. El post presenta el muy interesante “Consumer Finance Research Methods Toolkit”  que Erin ha preparado junto a Gawain Lynch en el contexto de su trabajo en IMTFI de la UC Irvine. Como ellos explican: el manual se enfoca en seis métodos en estudios sociales de las finanzas domésticas: etnografía, entrevistas verbales, entrevistas “object-centered”, diarios financieros, investigación digital y experimentos. Sin duda será de gran utilidad para futuros estudios en estas y otras áreas]

Consumer finance globally is undergoing a process of rapid change. With the rise of digital finance, consumers’ choices are no longer limited to products available in their place of residence. Gone are the days when our only options were local banks and moneylenders. Instead, those of us who have a digital device and Internet access can choose from an enormous array of products from all around the world. Insurance, savings, peer-to-peer lending, cryptocurrencies, and currency exchange services are just some of the services at our disposal. Even without Internet, millions of people are accessing new financial services through ordinary mobile phones. Consumer finance has gone global.

How can we understand consumer behaviour in this changing environment? Consumer choices can be difficult enough to understand at the best of times, and this explosion of product choice only promises to make our research more complex. We need to adapt our research methods to this new digital environment in order to keep abreast of how consumers make choices, what new risks they face, and what further financial services are needed. To assist researchers working in consumer finance, Gawain Lynch and I created the Consumer Finance Research Methods Toolkit for the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine. This toolkit is part of the larger Consumer Finance Research Methods Project, for which we produced a provocation paper and series of blog posts outlining major issues in consumer finance today. Continue reading →