De La(b) is a research community committed to understanding and influencing how individuals and households make financial decisions in their everyday lives. We believe that improving financial well-being requires more than identifying problems; it demands creating solutions that work in real-world contexts.
Our research examines how psychological and contextual factors shape decisions about earning, spending, saving, borrowing, insuring, and investing. We partner with nonprofits, fintech companies, banks, credit unions, employers, and government agencies to design and rigorously test environmental interventions that make better financial choices easier, more intuitive, and more accessible. Thus, we aim to generate insights that contribute to the theoretical literature on financial decision-making and produce tangible, real-world improvements in people’s financial well-being.
De La(b) is also equally committed to fostering a supportive and collaborative environment where members can learn from one another, test ideas, provide constructive feedback, and hold each other accountable.
Joining De La(b) is a meaningful commitment. Members are expected to attend biweekly meetings, collaborate on research projects, and actively provide feedback to peers.
Membership is limited to undergraduates, PhD students, and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania who are actively working on financial decision-making, as well as external collaborators currently working with Wendy De La Rosa.
If you’re excited about our work and believe you’d be a good fit, we’d love to hear from you. Please complete the contact form and share a brief statement of your research interests and how you hope to contribute to the lab.
In 2025, we launched a new interdisciplinary research seminar at The Wharton School on household finance and financial well-being (broadly defined). The goal is to bring together faculty and PhD students across disciplines to (1) learn from internal and external researchers working in this space and (2) spark new research collaborations. Financial well-being is a topic that spans nearly every department, as it influences a wide range of outcomes, including mental and physical health, worker productivity, decision-making, risk-taking, and spending. This is a truly interdisciplinary initiative, bringing together 45 faculty and PhD students from ACCT, BEPP, FNCE, HCM, MKTG, MGMT, and OID.
We kicked off the series on April 30th, 2025 at the close of Financial Literacy Month, with a set of “flash talks” from Wharton researchers including Linsey Cameron, Wendy De La Rosa, Rob Kuan, Katy Milkman, and Alex Rees-Jones.
In this coming academic year, the seminar will host the following speakers (in conjuction with the Decision Processes Colloquia)
Stay up to date with our upcoming events by joining the internal Wharton listserve fiwellseminar@wharton.upenn.edu.
Forthcoming
Previous
I sometimes like to play around and build things that make my life easier. Here's an example:
I needed to estimate individuals' potential Earned Income Tax Credit in California and I needed to do this for 150,000 people. Here's the quick webscraper I built in R. [ Code ]
Human: English, Spanish
Computer: R, SQL, Python, Tableau, VBA
United States, Dominican Republic
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