Indian School of Business-NBER Research Conference, 2025

The Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, India, hosted the fourth meeting in the annual joint ISB-NBER conference series on December 13–14, 2025. The meeting, which focused on "Household Finance Across the Lifecycle," was co-organized by Shilpa Aggarwal of ISB and Amit Seru of Stanford University and NBER. The conference program included eight research papers that touched on many central topics in Indian household finance, including the lifecycle profile of saving rates, access to credit for large purchases of durable goods and housing, portfolio choice and the factors that influence it, the relative importance of banks and other lending institutions, and the role of various insurance products, such as health insurance and deposit insurance, in affecting household behavior. The conference also included two panel discussions that reviewed the current state of research on household finance. One focused on India and the other on the United States, thereby facilitating the identification of similarities and differences between household financial practices in the two countries.