Christian Engels

Using data covering the near-universe of U.S. mortgage applications, this article documents that racial hate crimes are linked to significantly lower local mortgage demand. The decline is specific to racial hate crimes; no comparable effects arise for general crime and nonracial offenses. Application volumes fall for both minority and White applicants, with most minorities responding to incidents targeting their own group, indicating targeted threat, and White borrowers responding to incidents against other groups, consistent with generalized fear. Affected areas also exhibit higher psychological distress, lower conspicuous consumption, and lower home sales and house price growth, while rents show no comparable difference, consistent with the pattern being concentrated in owner-occupied housing.

@unpublished{EHHP2026,
  title  = {When Prejudice Hits Home: Hate Crime and the Market for Mortgage Credit},
  author = {Engels, Christian and Hasan, Iftekhar and Hong, Sizhe and Philip, Dennis},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Working paper},
  url    = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=4580504}
}

The gender pay gap among adults is well documented. This article uncovers an analogous gender income gap between girls and boys aged 6 to 15, where ‘income’ is defined as the amount of money children receive from their parents. Our analysis is based on large-scale, longitudinal data by a financial service provider that parents use to transfer money to their children. The data reveal that the gender income gap exists as early as age 6, when girls receive 6.36% less income than boys. The gap then grows throughout childhood (age 6 to 10), before diminishing and eventually reversing in adolescence (age 11 to 15). However, the data also show that (a) it takes almost a decade for girls to reach cumulative income parity with boys, despite girls completing more household tasks, and (b) the income gap in childhood means that girls never catch up with boys in terms of savings capacity, even after achieving income parity as teenagers. These early life disparities are notable because they indicate that girls have less opportunity to learn money management skills, and because they foreshadow many of the financial gender gaps that exist in adulthood.

@unpublished{EHLP2024,
  title  = {Early Roots of Inequality: Evidence of a Gender Income Gap Among Children},
  author = {Engels, Christian and Howard, Ray Charles and Lukas, Marcel and Philip, Dennis},
  year   = {2024},
  note   = {Working paper},
  url    = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=4879297}
}

We study consumers’ reactions in response to material privacy violations. Exploring privacy breach incidences of U.S. banks, where personally identifiable information (social security numbers, addresses, names) is exposed to unauthorized parties, we find that depositors reallocate significant wealth holdings away from breached banks – we note a 12% differential in total deposits growth between breached and control banks in the year following a breach of privacy. In response to the depletion in deposits, breached banks increase deposit rates just after breach incidences and draw on funding liquidity from the interbank market. The results highlight the importance of privacy for consumers.

@unpublished{EFP2022,
  title  = {The Cost of Privacy Failures: Evidence from Bank Depositors' Reactions to Breaches},
  author = {Engels, Christian and Francis, Bill and Philip, Dennis},
  year   = {2022},
  note   = {Working paper},
  url    = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=3625668}
}

This paper establishes a sizeable negative effect of poor mental health on individuals’ net worth. In a representative panel of U.S. households, we find that a one standard deviation (or four unit) increase in Kessler’s K6 psychological distress level decreases net worth by 13.2 percent and increases by 5 percent the baseline risk of being in deficit net worth, where levels of debt outstrip the value of assets. Survival analyses further show that psychological distress accelerates the entry into and prolongs the stay in deficit net worth states, as well as increasing the probability of re-entry into deficit. Using a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, we find that differences in level of savings, medical debt and labor income predominantly explain the lower net worth and higher likelihood of deficit net worth of individuals with high psychological distress. Our findings highlight the significant longer-term implications of mental health on the net worth of individuals.

@article{BEP2022,
  title   = {When it rains it drains: {P}sychological distress and household net worth},
  author  = {Balloch, Adnan and Engels, Christian and Philip, Dennis},
  journal = {Journal of Banking \& Finance},
  volume  = {143},
  pages   = {106620},
  year    = {2022},
  doi     = {10.1016/j.jbankfin.2022.106620}
}

Who is better at detecting fraud? This paper finds that more financially knowledgeable individuals have a higher propensity to detect fraud: a one standard deviation increase in financial knowledge increases fraud detection probabilities by 3 percentage points. The result is not driven by individuals’ higher financial product usage and is observed to be moderated by individuals’ low subjective well-being, effectively depleting skills to detect fraud. Interestingly, prudent financial behavior relating to basic money management is found to have negligible effects for detecting fraud. The findings attest to the fact that fraud tactics are increasingly complex and it is greater financial knowledge rather than basic money management skills that provides the degree of sophistication necessary to detect fraud. The paper draws policy implications for consumer education programs to go beyond cultivating money management skills, and provide advanced financial knowledge necessary for tackling fraud.

@article{EKP2020,
  title   = {Financial literacy and fraud detection},
  author  = {Engels, Christian and Kumar, Kamlesh and Philip, Dennis},
  journal = {The European Journal of Finance},
  volume  = {26},
  number  = {4-5},
  pages   = {420--442},
  year    = {2020},
  doi     = {10.1080/1351847X.2019.1646666}
}

Cross-border payment links connect national payment systems across borders. We exploit their staggered global rollout to study how payment infrastructure affects the pricing of cross-border transfers, focusing on the remittance market. Using the imputation estimator of Borusyak, Jaravel and Spiess (2024), we find that a single infrastructure shock produces opposing pricing responses from banks and money transfer operators (MTOs). Banks reduce fees by approximately 14% at impact, driven by lower FX margins. MTOs raise transfer fees by approximately 10% at impact; an offsetting decline in FX margins leaves total fees initially unchanged, but as the FX effect fades, total MTO fees rise to approximately 10% by four quarters after activation. The MTO fee increase varies across corridors: where banks have a larger market presence, MTO fee increases are substantially muted. The results have direct implications for the G20 target of reducing remittance costs below 3%: while CB links lower bank fees, the unintended increase in MTO transfer fees may offset these gains for customers who depend on non-bank providers, particularly in corridors where bank competition is absent.