I study what people actually do with their money.

Joe Gladstone studies the psychology of money: why people spend, save and borrow as they do, and why households with similar incomes end up in such different places. He is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego. He works mainly with bank transaction records, often shared by banks and fintech companies, and with national surveys that follow the same households for decades.

His research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research and Psychological Science, and has been covered by BBC World News, where he is a regular guest, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Time. He was named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in Finance in 2017 and was a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar in 2023.

Before UC San Diego he was on the faculty at University College London and the University of Colorado Boulder, where he co-directed the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making and chaired the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in psychology from the University of Oxford. During the PhD he worked with banks, an insurer, a card network and a consumer watchdog, and wrote reports for the UK’s financial regulator.

He teaches The Behavioral Science of Money, an undergraduate course. He grew up in Brighton, on England’s south coast, and lives in San Diego, where he cycles, plays dodgeball and listens to a lot of history podcasts.