Research · Issue areas
The Institute of FAME funds peer-reviewed research and produces policy-translation outputs concentrated in four issue areas where the institute has demonstrated empirical standing. Each area is anchored to a peer-reviewed evidence base, connects to live policy questions where decision-grade evidence has weight, and produces specific briefs, op-eds, regulatory comments, and convenings.
Issue area · Financial Education Measurement
Personal-finance curricula reach 30 million U.S. K-12 students annually on largely-untested behavioral assumptions. What measurement-grade evidence shows which interventions actually predict adult financial outcomes?
Validated psychometric instruments and outcome-grounded research for the financial-literacy curricula that personal-finance education depends on.
Issue area · FinTech Regulation
Regulatory sandboxes have been adopted in more than fifty jurisdictions, but the empirical evidence on whether they accelerate productive entry — or just produce regulatory press releases — has lagged. What does the UK record actually show, and what should U.S. and other developed-economy regulators learn from it?
Empirical evidence on whether regulatory sandboxes deliver the FinTech-entry-acceleration and consumer-protection-learning their proponents promise — and what U.S. policy should learn from the UK record.
Issue area · FinTech Consumer Equity
Buy-now-pay-later, alternative credit data, and FinTech-driven small-business credit have produced uneven outcomes for under-resourced households and SMEs. Which products genuinely expand access — and which extract from the populations they serve?
Behavioral and structural evidence on FinTech adoption among under-resourced consumers and small enterprises — informing consumer-protection regulation, financial-inclusion policy, and SME-credit programs.
Issue area · CBDC and Digital Money
134 jurisdictions are exploring central bank digital currencies, yet retail adoption in the early-launch markets has been thin. Under what behavioral conditions will citizens of developed-economy CBDC issuers actually migrate to the new instruments?
Behavioral-adoption evidence on central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, and other digital monetary instruments — informing ECB digital-euro communication strategy and U.S. Federal Reserve / Bank of England deliberations.
Issue areas organize FAME's policy-translation work; the institute's active research programs produce the underlying evidence. Most issue areas draw from one or two programs; one program may contribute to multiple issue areas. The institute's published papers are the empirical foundation, and the policy positions page articulates the institute's standing on specific questions within each area.