Research in Financial Planning, Housing and Consumer Economics
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Sophia Anong
Associate Professor
- Mobile money and digitized services in African countries.
- Consumer complaint handling and redress in African digital markets
- Fintech and digital divide for low-income, minorities, unbanked, and other vulnerable groups
Contactless payments and the payment divide
Recent funding: Facebook
I am working on a randomized evaluation of increasing the number of female mobile money agents in rural Ghana. Expected outcomes include increased overall agency for women personally, in shared households, and in their communities, increased consumer agency, and a decrease in fraud which has been found to be highest among female agent to female customer interactions.
I also lead two projects that study the accelerated adoption of contactless payments during the pandemic. In one project, our multidisciplinary team surveys U.S. consumers and small business owners and also incorporates discrete payment choice experiments with both groups. The purpose is to detect digital and payment divides, attitudes, and linkages with localized factors such as payment infrastructure, COVID-19 infection rates, and reopening guidelines. Developments with federally-approved COVID-19 drug treatments or vaccine as well as with two pending bills, the Payment Choice Act and the Touchless Transactions Act, are also considered. The other project is an intervention with small businesses in the state of Georgia. This is a randomized evaluation that examines effects of offering rewards and tailored information on new adoptions or expansions of remote or in-store contactless payment systems. The two payment bills are also implemented hypothetically and evaluated. The study oversamples ethnic minority owners and those in lower-income or rural locations.
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Kristy Archuleta
Professor
Dr. Archuleta has an established international reputation in the area of financial therapy. This area integrates psychological, relational, and financial factors affecting individual, couple, and family well-being.
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Patryk Babiarz
Associate Professor
I have wide-ranging research interests that include topics in personal finance, consumer economics, and health economics.
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Mary Bell Carlson
Adjunct Faculty
My research centers around financial behavior, financial counseling, coaching, and therapy.
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Andy Carswell
Professor
Dr. Carswell’s work covers a variety of housing-related topics, but he is particularly known for mortgage fraud and property management research.
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Swarn Chatterjee
Interim Department Head and Bluerock Professor of Financial Planning
My research focuses on three primary areas: Performance evaluation across different stages of the financial planning process; Examination of the association between financial well-being, welfare dependency, and health among underserved populations; and Identification of factors that improve financial decision making among transitioning young adults and the elderly households.
My current research in progress includes: Measuring the value of financial advice across the different stages of the financial planning process; examining factors that are associated with greater financial resiliency among households recovering from an adverse financial event; and determining the association between household financial decision making and their food insecurity as well as food purchase behavior.
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Sam Cupples
Lecturer
My research focuses on the impact of Behavioral Finance on decision making processes in the area of Personal Financial Planning.
My current research includes two areas: (a) the association of personality on personal financial decision making, and (b) the association of financial risk tolerance on personal finanical decision making.
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Jermaine Durham
Assistant Professor of Housing and Community Development
Dr. Durham is interested in researching housing and community development, residential inequality, and housing policy.
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Heidi Ewen
Adjunct Faculty
My combined research and teaching agenda reflects a commitment to the biopsychosocial aspects of aging, stress & adaptation, housing, and relocation decision-making. I frame my teaching and research primarily from an interdisciplinary perspective largely built upon social psychology experimental paradigms. The majority of my scholarly work is on aging and environment, particularly aging-in-place and relocation decision-making, stress, and adaptation among older adults using a mixed methods research designs. I have analyzed data with basic univariate statistics, advanced multivariate statistics, and case study approaches.
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Joseph Goetz
Professor
- Implications of the fiduciary standard on the investment advice process
- Investment risk tolerance and risk perception factors in portfolio optimization
- Effectiveness of financial readiness and education programming for US Air Force
- Effectiveness of theoretically-based financial planning intervention models
- Implications of the fiduciary standard on the investment advice process
- Investment risk tolerance and risk perception factors in portfolio optimization
- Effectiveness of financial readiness and education programming for US Air Force
- Effectiveness of theoretically-based financial planning intervention models
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John Grable
Athletic Association Endowed Professor of Family and Consumer Sciences
My research interests include financial risk-tolerance assessment, behavioral financial planning, and financial decision making. My work tends to be applied and focused on helping consumers and financial service professionals navigate the increasingly complex financial marketplace. Working with colleagues in the ASPIRE clinic, I am actively engaged in conducting evidence-based research.
My students and I are currently working on projects related to financial risk tolerance assessment. A seperate line of research involves the clinical evaluation of financial planning practice standards and models.
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Joan Koonce
Professor & Extension Financial Planning Specialist
My research examines several areas of family financial planning, financial behavior of youth and family communication about finances, and low-income consumers and poverty.
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Stephen Kuzniak
Part-Time Lecturer
My research focuses on Behavioral Economics, Risk Tolerance and Assessment, Financial Therapy, Financial Decision Making, and Popular Consumer Finance.
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Diann Moorman
Associate Professor
- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
- Bankruptcy
- Low-income households
- Single-parent households
- Teenage-mother households
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Lance Palmer
Professor
Dr. Palmer's research seeks to identify effective ways of motivating financial behavior change through brief intervention strategies. He is currently focused on developing brief interventions that are informative, scalable, and can easily be integrated into the income tax preparation process. The design and format of the brief interventions are informed by research findings from behavioral economics and behavior change theory, as well as evidenced-based counseling practices such as Solutions-Focused Brief Coaching.
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Yilang Peng
Assistant Professor
My scholarship is at the intersection of computational social science, visual communication, and media effects. My research applies cutting-edge computer vision methods to investigate the production and effects of visual media, an increasingly prevalent component of today’s digital media environment. My works have been published in leading venues both in communication and human-computer interaction, including the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, New Media & Society, the International Journal of Press/Politics, the International Journal of Communication, Public Understanding of Science, and the Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
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Ron Sages
Adjunct Professor
I aspire to bring applied research to financial planning practitioners in an effort to provide practical solutions to client-focused challenges.
I currently am focusing on Applied Behavioral Finance research surrounding the discipline of estate planning, incorporating behavioral factors associated with probate litigation within traditional and blended families.
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Jerry Shannon
Associate Professor
I'm a geographer studying how to make urban neighborhoods and food systems healthier and more equitable. My broad interests are in urban development and inequality, geographic information systems, political geography, and place effects on health. More specifically, my research focuses on the role of maps in shaping our understanding of hunger, housing, poverty, and neighborhood development.
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Department of Financial Planning, Housing, and Consumer Economics at the University of Georgia. I also direct the Community Mapping Lab in the Department of Geography and am an assistant director of the Housing and Demographics Research Center on campus.
You can find more information on my specific research projects on my research page. Among other things, I am currently aiding in a participatory planning process with the Atlanta Community Food Bank, studying the local effects of changes to SNAP (food stamps) in Georgia during the Great Recession, doing participatory mapping of the housing landscape in several Georgia cities, and developing a data dashboard for open data here in Athens-Clarke County. I am currently seeking graduate students interested in open data, participatory research, data visualization, and community development. -
Kimberly Skobba
Associate Professor
My research focuses on two distinct areas 1) the housing needs of low-income households and 2) the relationship between community development and social capital in rural and small towns. Through the use of a qualitative, biographical method, I study the connection between housing pathways and life circumstances of low-income households. My research on housing instability among low-income households has advanced the understanding of the different strategies that families use to maintain shelter and the ways in which personal characteristics and life course events affect their ability to find and maintain housing. My second area of research examines the housing and community development experiences and the role of social capital in community development capacity of rural and small towns. My research in this area uses surveys, qualitative data collection and case studies to better understand the housing and community development challenges and potential solutions facing rural and small town communities in the Southeastern region of the United States.
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Aman Sunder
Part-Time Lecturer
Gender and ethnic diversity in the Financial Planning profession and academia.
Financial help-seeking behavior during the Great Recession.
ESG/ SRI investments.
Work-life balance and burnout among women in the financial planning profession.
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Michael Thomas
Lecturer
My research interest involves understanding what factors influence financial well-being across socio-economic status and how to optimize those factors through evidenced-based interventions or therapeutic methods.
I teach all sections of the Intro to Personal Finance course.
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Pamela Turner
Professor and Extension Housing & Indoor Environment Specialist
My research focuses on linkages between health and housing, creating safe and healthy child care environments, and the use of social media to provide people with an online source of trustworthy information.
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Dee Warmath
Assistant Professor
My research examines the role of shared decision making and decision skill in well-being with a specific focus on the domains of health, money, and relationships.
For the past five years, I have served as the Principal Investigator for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection on its project to define and measure financial well-being, as well as test hypotheses of its drivers. I currently serve as a Principal Investigator in the NCAA / Department of Defense Mind Matters Challenge with a three-year project examining the role of design thinking and social marketing in encouraging concussion reporting among young adults. My research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, and Sports Health and presented at the National Athletic Training Association, GLATA, Frontiers in Service, Association for Consumer Research, American Council of Consumer Interests, CFP Academic Research Colloquium, Financial Planning Association, and other conferences. I am also a fellow of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Kenneth White
Assistant Professor
My scholarship focuses on the financial wellbeing of historically marginalized groups; the scholarship of teaching and learning; and diversity, equity and inclusion in the financial planning profession.
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Sheri Worthy
Samuel A. and Sharon Y. Nickols Professor, Associate Dean for Academic Programs
I have explored a range of consumer-related topics in my research including consumer vulnerability, savings, and financial risk-taking behaviors. I have been part of a multi-state research group that investigated the psychological and economics factors related to saving, and behavioral economics, financial decision-making and information management across the lifespan. We conducted focus groups and online experiments to investigate student loan decision making, housing purchase, and retirement planning. I also evaluated Turning the Tide on Poverty, a project implemented in several states to encourage civic engagement and grass-roots problem solving of community issues in rural, poverty-striken areas.
My current research focuses on consumer health and well-being. I am part of the multi-state research group studying behavioral economics and the intersection of healthcare and financial decision making across the lifespan.
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Velma Zahirovic-Herbert
Professor and Graduate Coordinator
My research interests are in the applications of consumer behavior theories to real property markets. My research has been published in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Research, Land Economics, Journal of Housing Economics, Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, Southern Economic Journal, and other related journals. I am a managing editor of the Journal of Housing Research and the editorial board member of the Journal of Real Estate Literature and the Journal of European Real Estate Research. I recently received the William N. Kinnard Young Scholar Award, which recognizes an outstanding young real estate scholar for works reflected in multiple publications.
I am an active member of the American Real Estate Society, where I chair the ARES women’s caucus group, Connecting-Women in Real Estate Research & Education. I also serve as a board representative of the International Real Estate Society. Locally, I am engaged with the Land Economics Society and I serve as the Vice President of the Atlanta Chapter.