A New Financial Resilience Framework

With speaker Professor Elizabeth Sheedy, Department of Applied Finance, Macquarie Business School, Sydney, Australia

The multi-disciplinary Diaries26 team has created a new financial resilience framework incorporating and adapting concepts from risk management as well as psychology. The framework is grounded in survey, interview and transaction data across some 75 young adults aged 18-40.

Our sample is drawn from 6 locations in eastern Australia, both urban and regional. We explore the use of more than 60 possible strategies for adapting to the cost of living challenges experienced in 2023.

The variation in their experiences cannot be explained by financial resources alone, but the new framework sheds light on how/why young adults coped (or not) with recent cost of living challenges.

We propose a follow-on survey study to investigate whether findings from this exploratory ethnographic research generalize to a broader population. We also propose potential applications for the research relating to responsible lending practices. The research could be incorporated into tools and educational resources for customers to build financial resilience and avoid excessive debt.

The speaker 

Professor Elizabeth Sheedy is a financial risk management expert based in the Department of Applied Finance in Macquarie Business School in Sydney. Elizabeth uses a range of research methods to build understanding of behaviour including: surveys, experiments, interviews as well as the econometric methods traditionally used by finance scholars. She has collaborated with scholars in other disciplines, including organisational psychology and experimental economics. This multi-methods, multi-disciplinary approach has produced a number of ground-breaking findings in the field, including development of the Macquarie University Risk Culture Scale. This psychometrically-validated survey instrument has been found to predict a range of behaviours important in this industry. She publishes in top international journals and her book ‘Risk Governance: Biases, Blindspots and Bonuses’ was published in 2021. She has worked on the Diaries2026 project since mid-2022 and is currently acting Program Director. 

If you would like to attend this online CHASM Seminar, please email Helen Harris – chasm@contacts.bham.ac.uk – with your contact details, and the Zoom link will be sent to you.