Biography

Tsung-Hsien Li is a quantitative macroeconomist with a current interest in consumer finance and default. He is a 5th-year PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Mannheim. During his PhD studies, he spent a semester at Yale University as a visiting graduate student. Before pursuing his doctorate, he worked as an economic and financial analyst at the Central Bank of Taiwan for two years. He received his master's and bachelor's degrees in Economics from National Taiwan University.

As a Max Weber Fellow, Tsung-Hsien aims to publish his dissertation and develop new research projects. In one of his works, he studies puzzling US household finance behaviour. It has been documented that many credit cardholders turn to expensive payday loans, even though they have not exhausted their credit cards. This behaviour is puzzling and results in high monetary costs because the average annual interest rate of payday loans is 400%, which is way higher than credit cards of 20%. This has been termed the 'Payday Loan Puzzle.' He contributes to the literature by proposing the novel rational explanation that households choose expensive payday loans over cheaper alternatives to protect their credit scores because it is not mandatory for payday lenders in the US to report to credit bureaus.