Sustainable Household Finance

Project by

Arna Olafsson
Senior Fellow 2025–2026

This project uses transaction-level bank data to investigate how households engage with sustainability through their financial decisions. While much attention has been paid to corporate sustainability strategies, less is known about how individual households contribute to—or engage with—sustainable finance.

By analyzing detailed banking data, the project explores questions such as: How is the use of financial products that promote sustainability related to other sustainability efforts of households? How are sustainability efforts of households through financial markets distributed across households? How are these efforts related to general financial well-being? The project also examines how banks and financial institutions can facilitate or influence sustainable behavior. Because the analysis is grounded in real-world data at the individual level—often linked to field experiments—it provides unique insights into the motivations, barriers, and mechanisms behind sustainable financial behavior. In doing so, the project contributes to a better understanding of how private households can drive the transition to a more sustainable economy, and how financial institutions might support that role.