Assist. Prof. Raymond Kluender, Ph.D.

Inflation and Young Adults

For the first time in their lives, Millennials and Gen Z are witnessing high rates of inflation in the US. The current inflation episode presents a unique opportunity for Raymond Kluender and his collaborators to investigate the impact of inflation on households and how inflation expectations translate to different economic decisions in a time of high inflation. Recent developments in the data available to study household consumption-savings decisions can unlock new answers to critical questions faced by central bankers, policymakers, and firms.

Mr. Kluender’s fields of interest are household finance and health economics. While visiting CES, he will pursue research on how households respond to inflation using linked survey-bank account transactions data on 10,000 low-income households (joint with Sasha Indarte, Ulrike Malmendier, and Michael Stepner), how households respond when they have debt relieved using a large-scale randomized control trial which forgave $140 million of debt for 80,000 people (joint with Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong, and Wesley Yin), and how households manage high levels of indebtedness and the decision to file for bankruptcy (joint with Samuel Antill).

Raymond Kluender is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and faculty affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). His work has been published in American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of American Medical Association, among other outlets. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow in Household Finance at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.