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The purpose of this literature review paper is to define consumer finance, describe the scope of consumer finance and discuss its future research directions.

In this paper, consumer finance is used as a synonym of household finance. Consumers refer to individuals and families. After defining the term “consumer finance,” we conducted a critical review of consumer finance as an interdisciplinary research field in terms of money managing, insuring, borrowing and saving/investing. Future research directions are also discussed.

This paper discusses similarities and differences among several terms such as consumer finance, household finance, personal finance, family finance and behavioral finance. The paper also reviewed key studies on consumer financial behavior around four key financial functions, namely, money management, insurance, loan and saving/investment and several nontraditional topics such as fintech and financial capability/literacy. The paper also introduced several datasets of consumer finance commonly used in the United States and China.

This paper clarified several similar terms related to consumer finance and sorted out the diverse literature of consumer finance in multiple disciplines such as economics, finance and consumer science, which provide a foundation for generating more fruitful research in consumer finance in the future.

Most academic libraries provide book recommendation services to enable readers to recommend books to the libraries. To facilitate decision-making in book acquisition, this study aimed to develop a method to determine the ranking of the recommended books based on the recommender network.

The recommender network was conducted to establish relationships among book recommenders and their similar readers by using circulation records. Furthermore, social computing techniques were used to evaluate the degree of representativeness of the recommenders and subsequently applied as a criterion to rank the recommended books. Empirical studies were performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ranking system. The Spearman’s correlation coefficients between the proposed ranking system and the ranking obtained using reader circulation statistics were used as performance measure.

The ranking calculated using the proposed ranking mechanism was highly and moderately correlated to the ranking obtained using reader circulation statistics. The ranking of recommended books by the librarians was moderately and poorly correlated to the ranking calculated using reader circulation statistics.

The book recommender can be used to improve the accuracy of book recommendations.

This study is the first that considers the recommender network on library book acquisition. The results also show that the proposed ranking mechanism can facilitate effective book-acquisition decisions in libraries.

This study aims to understand the unique financial behavior of transgender individuals compared to cisgender individuals. Furthermore, this study aims to demonstrate that understanding the financial behavior of transgender people will help financial institutions, regulators and policymakers to include them in the formal financial sector.

The qualitative approach to research aims at understanding a given phenomenon among the participants. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with 28 transgender and cisgender individuals each. Thematic analysis is used to understand the participants’ financial behavior and propose future research directions and implications to regulators and practitioners.

The transgender participants (TP) earn no stable income compared to cisgender participants. Due to a lack of regular income, TP faces hardships covering their spending. No fixed spending or financial planning pattern is found among the TP, and they are found to be highly uncertain of their income and spending. The TP is found wholly excluded from the financial system, and not even a single participant with an active bank account or insurance is found. TP has not visited a bank in their lifetime, and financial literacy is found completely missing among them. No TP has ever taken a bank loan or credit from a financial institution. A zeal among TP to be financially included is found, and such participation will undoubtedly help them live a financially independent life. Cisgender people (CP) are found to be earning a stable income, have full-time jobs, save money, transact through a formal financial system and are financially more independent than TPs. Gender is shown to play a role in the financial behavior of the participants.

This study gathers information from transgender and CP and does not focus on the financial services providers; the decision not to interview the providers of financial services is a potential limitation of the present study. Another limitation is the small number of respondents who participated in the semi-structured interviews. Due to these limitations, the generalizability of the findings of this study regarding financial behavior will be restricted and require further evidence from future research.

The present study has several practical implications. First, the requirement of understanding the financial behavior of transgender people from their perspective is missing in the literature, and studies focusing on their behavior are required to help them be financially independent. The present study has implications for regulators, policymakers and practitioners to help transgender people improve their financial conditions.

The existing literature does not include studies focusing on understanding the financial behavior of transgender people or drawing a comparison of the financial behavior of transgender or CP. The present study explores the financial behavior of transgender people and highlights the unique financial behavior of transgender individuals.

Traditional library book recommendation methods are mainly based on association rules and user profiles. They may help to learn about students' interest in different types of books, e.g., students majoring in science and engineering tend to pay more attention to computer books. Nevertheless, most of them still need to identify users' interests accurately. To solve the problem, the authors propose a novel embedding-driven model called InFo, which refers to users' intrinsic interests and academic preferences to provide personalized library book recommendations.

The authors analyze the characteristics and challenges in real library book recommendations and then propose a method considering feature interactions. Specifically, the authors leverage the attention unit to extract students' preferences for different categories of books from their borrowing history, after which we feed the unit into the Factorization Machine with other context-aware features to learn students' hybrid interests. The authors employ a convolution neural network to extract high-order correlations among feature maps which are obtained by the outer product between feature embeddings.

The authors evaluate the model by conducting experiments on a real-world dataset in one university. The results show that the model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of two metrics called Recall and NDCG.

It requires a specific data size to prevent overfitting during model training, and the proposed method may face the user/item cold-start challenge.

The embedding-driven book recommendation model could be applied in real libraries to provide valuable recommendations based on readers' preferences.

The proposed method is a practical embedding-driven model that accurately captures diverse user preferences.

This study has a dual purpose. The first is constructing a financial inclusion index to investigate if the reforms implemented during the last decades at the macroeconomic and sectoral levels have contributed to increase the financial inclusion level in Morocco. The second is to deepen the investigation to explore the impact of these reforms at the microeconomic level, by focusing on six major issues: determinants of financial inclusion, links between individual characteristics and barriers to financial inclusion, determinants of mobile banking use, motivations for saving, credit objectives and determinants of resorting to informal finance.

First, the principal component analysis methodology is mobilized to construct a financial inclusion index for Morocco. Second, the probit model methodology on a micro-level database of 5,110 Moroccan adults is used.

First, the financial inclusion index shows that financial inclusion in Morocco over the last two decades has followed different trends. The first period (1999–2004) was characterized by a slight upswing in the level of financial inclusion. In the second period (2004–2012), the level of financial inclusion increased significantly. During the third period (2012–2019), the financial inclusion maintained almost the same level. Second, empirical results showed that the determinants of formal finance and mobile banking are different from those of informal finance. Having a high educational attainment and being a participant in the labor market fosters financial inclusion. Concerning financial exclusion determinants, the results emphasized that a high educational attainment reduces the barriers leading to voluntary exclusion. As income level increases, barriers of involuntary exclusion such as “lack of money” become surmountable. Although "remoteness" and "high cost" are the major barriers to financial inclusion of all Moroccan social classes, the development of mobile banking allows to eliminate, smoothen and/or loosen all barriers sources of involuntary exclusion. As for the barriers causing voluntary exclusion, the Islamic finance model constitutes a lever for the inclusion of population segments excluded for religious reasons. As for the determinants of the recourse to informal finance, being a woman, an older person and having a low educational level (no more than secondary education) increase the probability to turn to informal finance.

The main limitation of this study is the non-availability of data on the two dimensions (quality and welfare) of financial inclusion. The composite index is constructed on the basis of two dimensions (access and use) for which data are available.

This study has three main implications. In practice, with the launching of the National Strategy for Financial Inclusion, this work provides empirical grounded evidence that contributes to design financial inclusion policies in Morocco. In research, while the debate on financial inclusion, mobile banking and informal finance has been raging in recent years, Morocco, like many other African countries, has not received coverage on these topics at the household level.

For society, this study provides considerable insight about the segments of population that are financially excluded and the main reasons for their exclusion.

This study enriches the existing literature with four essential contributions. First, it analyzes the evolution of the level of financial inclusion in the Moroccan economy through the development of a synthetic index. Second, it is the first to study the Moroccan population's financial behavior on the basis of micro-level data, which will help understand more precisely their financial behavior and the main obstacles to their inclusion. Third, this study explores the determinants of the use of mobile banking. Fourth, it sheds some light on the main determinants of the recourse to informal finance.

The purpose of this paper is to document debt delinquency patterns by family lifecycle categories using multiple data sets that are nationally representative of American families.

Based on previous research, 15 lifecycle categories appropriate for American families are defined by household head's age, marital status, presence of children, and age of children. Data used are from Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCF) in the USA in 1992-2010. Multiple logistic regressions are conducted to identify probabilities of debt delinquencies of families in various lifecycle categories by controlling for income, financial assets, holdings of several types of debt, and several other demographic and socioeconomic variables.

The results show that among the 15 household lifecycle categories, the top three most likely to be delinquent are young couples with children aged seven or older, middle-aged singles with children aged 15 or older, and middle-aged singles with children under 15. Younger households are more financially distressed than their older counterparts. Presence of children increases the probability of debt delinquency.

In this study, multiple national data sets representing American families are used to document debt delinquency patterns by family lifecycle categories. Results shed light on this important topic and offer helpful information for both banking industry practitioners and consumer financial educators.

The information produced by this study can help bank managers better identify their potential clients and understand their current customers. Different marketing strategies based on the research findings can be developed to attract and retain customers with different delinquency risks.

This is the first study to examine debt delinquencies by family lifecycle categories with multiple SCF data sets in the USA. The 15 family lifecycle categories used are based on recent research that is specially designed for American families. The research findings provide straightforward implications for both bank managers and consumer educators.

Under the background of low consumer financial knowledge and accumulated credit card liabilities, this study investigates the relationship between financial knowledge and responsible credit card behavior using data from the 2019 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS). From the perspective of consumer economic well-being, this study defines accruing credit card debt to buy houses and cars when loans with lower interest rates are available as irresponsible credit card behavior.

This study uses probit regressions to examine the association between financial knowledge and responsible credit card behavior because the dependent variable is a dummy variable. To alleviate endogeneity problems, this study uses instrument variables and Heckman’s two-step estimation. Furthermore, to explore the potential mediators in this process, this study follows the stepwise regression method. Finally, this study introduces interaction terms to examine whether this association differs in different groups.

The results indicate that financial knowledge is conducive to increasing the probability of responsible credit card behavior. Mediating analyses reveal that the roles of financial knowledge occur by increasing the degree of concern for financial and economic information and the propensity to plan. Moderating analyses show that the effects of financial knowledge on responsible credit card behavior are stronger among risk-averse consumers and in regions with favorable digital access.

This study measures responsible credit card behavior from the perspective of the consumer’s well-being, which enriches practical implications for consumer finance. Furthermore, this study explores the potential mediators influencing the process of financial knowledge that affects responsible credit card behavior and identifies moderators to conduct heterogeneous analyses, which helps comprehensively understand the nexus between financial knowledge and credit card behavior. By achieving these contributions, this study helps to curb the adverse effects of irresponsible credit card behavior on consumers’ well-being and the economic system and helps policymakers promote financial knowledge to fully prevent irresponsible credit card behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to assess and explain the leverage of Saudi companies (53 companies) during the period 2003‐2007.

This paper reviews two different classical capital structure theories, namely tradeoff theory and pecking order theory, to formulate testable propositions concerning the determinants of debt levels of Saudi companies. It develops a number of regression models (pooled OLS and panel techniques) to test the study's hypotheses.

The results suggest that a firm's capital structure is positively affected by profitability, size, growth opportunities, and institutional ownership. It is negatively impacted by tangibility, government ownership, family ownership, business risk, dividend payment, and liquidity.

Cost of capital is one of the pillars of corporate competitive advantage. Knowing which factors have the potential to influence capital structure can be essential to minimizing the cost of capital.

This is the first study of the determinants of capital structure in Saudi Arabia that considers dividend payment, ownership structure (as a proxy for agency problems), and risk. This work also contributes to the current debate regarding theories of competitive capital structure.

This study examines the role of the big five personality traits: conscientiousness, openness, extroversion, neuroticism and agreeableness in financial planning.

The research design is a quantitative approach. The study has used structured questionnaires to collect data from 403 business students. The hypotheses were tested through structural equation modeling using AMOS.

The findings revealed that extroversion of personality traits have a significant negative influence on financial planning, neuroticism and conscious personalities have a significant positive effect on financial planning. However, two personality traits, namely openness and agreeableness, have no significant influence on financial planning. The study confirmed that out of five, three personality traits have significant impact on financial planning.

The results suggest that all personality traits do not influence financial planning among students. Financial planning is deemed an essential decision in life. Although some people are very conscious about their future expenditures, others are not much concerned. Based on the findings, this study recommends that policymakers may conduct workshops and arrange seminars and conferences for the promotion of financial planning and individual's financial well-being. The government needs to promote financial education that can directly and indirectly enhance the saving planning capabilities of the people.

The results suggest that not all personality traits facilitate financial planning. Financial planning is deemed as a crucial decision in life. Some students are very conscious about their future expenditures, while others are not much concerned. This study recommends that policymakers conduct workshops and arrange seminars and conferences to promote financial planning and individuals' financial well-being. The government of Pakistan needs to promote financial education that can, directly and indirectly, enhance the savings and planning capabilities of the students.

This research contributes to the personality literature, the theory of planned behavior and the life cycle theory by testing the model based on empirical evidence. The current study is the first to focus on the role of the big five personality traits in financial planning among students in Pakistan, an emerging economy.

Research reveals alarming results on the prevalence of the dishonest consumer behaviour known as deshopping. Deshopping is the “deliberate return of goods for reasons other than actual faults in the product, in its pure form premeditated prior to and during the consumption experience”. In effect this means buying something with no intention of keeping it. The authors consider the implications of deshopping and retailers’ prevention of deshopping, exploring the research undertaken to date and the methodology for further research.