We study the usage and welfare implications of earned wage access (EWA) using administrative and survey data from a Mexican FinTech provider. Adoption is significant, and usage concentrates at the end of the pay cycle. We develop a stationary buffer-stock framework, calibrated to the data, in which EWA provides liquidity insurance and consumption-timing alignment. Access is worth about 2.5% of a paycheck per year for the average user, and an order of magnitude more for impatient, low-liquidity workers. Automatic repayment makes these gains more robust to present bias than with revolving credit. EWA usage is associated with higher employee retention, as the framework implies.
@unpublished{murillo2025ewa,title={Fintech to the (Worker) Rescue? Earned Wage Access, Worker Welfare and Employee Retention},author={Murillo, Jose and Vallee, Boris and Yu, Dolly},year={2026},note={Selected for the 2023 NBER Innovative Data in Household Finance, MFA 2026, and SGF 2026},}
The Shadow Cost of Credit: Payment Choice and Credit Capacity
Linking 1.5 million delivery orders to households’ daily credit position, we find that a household’s cash use rises in a convex pattern with its credit utilization. This pattern reflects a motive to preserve available credit for future expenditure shocks that may go on credit. As utilization rises, the remaining credit is more likely to fall short of such a shock; therefore, each dollar of anticipated consumption paid on credit costs more, and households substitute cash for credit. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that bank-initiated limit increases reduce cash use, most among households near their limit. We estimate that for a household that pays no interest, a dollar on credit carries a shadow cost of 5 cents at 20 percent utilization and 24 cents at 80 percent, close to the 25 cents of lifetime interest on a dollar of revolving debt.
@unpublished{yu2024creditlimit,title={The Shadow Cost of Credit: Payment Choice and Credit Capacity},author={Yu, Dolly and Murillo, Jose},year={2026},}
Riding the Waves: Geographic Diversification and Bank Responses to Local Funding Shocks
We exploit a segment of Chinese wealth management products (WMP) to isolate demand-side funding shocks from asset-side considerations, documenting a 60% pass-through of local inflation shocks to yields. We demonstrate that large banks’ geographic footprint enables active, high-frequency liability reallocation across regions via internal capital markets, with greater yield response than smaller banks and significant cross-regional hedging behavior.
@unpublished{yu2024ridingwaves,title={Riding the Waves: Geographic Diversification and Bank Responses to Local Funding Shocks},author={Yu, Dolly and Li, Wei and Liu, Mingmei},year={2026},note={Selected for the 2025 EWMES and 2025 Sydney Banking and Financial Stability Conference},}
We document product features and usage patterns of rent-to-own customers utilizing proprietary company data, and evaluate the optimality conditions for using rent-to-own contracts by calibrating a housing choice model.
@unpublished{yu2024rto,title={The Economics of Rent-to-Own Housing},author={Yu, Dolly},year={2026},}
Analyzes shared home equity as an alternative household home-buying financing option by comparing the product of a home equity start-up and traditional access to capital.
@techreport{yu2020sharedequity,title={A Case in Point: Shared Home Equity},author={Yu, Dolly and Vallee, Boris and Green, Daniel and Beaumaster, Sid},year={2020},institution={Harvard Business School},number={221-026},}
Seso Global: Building a Blockchain-enabled Property Marketplace in Nigeria
Discusses the challenges and opportunities of reinventing the real estate ecosystem in a developing economy by examining the business model of a Blockchain startup.
@techreport{yu2020seso,title={Seso Global: Building a Blockchain-enabled Property Marketplace in Nigeria},author={Yu, Dolly and Vallee, Boris},year={2020},institution={Harvard Business School},number={220-055},}