Dear Colleagues,

Households make environmental, social, and financial choices and decisions on a day-to-day basis. Traditional economic models usually focus on maximizing problems within one unit and one lifecycle, ignoring the needs of other units and future generations. Household sustainability is a new research field that aims to understand how households make environmental, social, and financial choices, and the interactions and influences across these three dimensions, to maximize their current utility without hurting the utility of future generations. Within the existing economic frameworks, household sustainability considers two additional fundamental issues: (1) concerns for the long-term growth (for descendants), and (2) constraints placed on human societies.

Specifically, household environmental sustainability involves the household’s choices on environmental-related options and the impact of environmental issues on household decisions, for example, the household usage of utilities, choices of transportation mode, and consumption of food types. Household social sustainability focuses on social issues that influence the welfare of an entire group of the population across generations, such as the gender gap, woman’s education, minimum wage and employment protection, aging population and retirement safety, intergenerational and income inequality, health safety and security, terrorist attacks and pandemics, etc. Household financial sustainability mainly revolves around financial decisions that impact one’s ability to sustain future development, for example, mistakes in using financial products, consumption and savings decisions, non-optimal investment behaviors, behavioral biases, and methods to mitigate financial mistakes.

The Special Issue seeks research that provides insights on sustainable day-to day actions of households as well as factors underlying households’ choices. Both theoretical and empirical research papers related to the above topics are welcome. This Special Issue aims to offer a platform where all different topics may be presented to recompose the multi-faceted subject within the area of household sustainability. 

Prof. Dr. Sumit Agarwal
Dr. Jian Zhang
Dr. Xin Zou
Guest Editors

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• household behavior
• environment
• sustainability
• financial decision
• social influence