More than a quarter of working-age households in the United States do not have sufficient savings to cover their expenditures after a month of unemployment. Recent proposals suggest giving workers early access to a small portion of their future Social Security benefits to finance their...

We conduct a field experiment that randomly offers individuals different monthly payment obligations (debt) in exchange for pledging varying shares of their future incomes (equity). Our design identifies selection and treatment effects across both debt and equity dimen- sions of the experimental...

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic led to a large number of studies in household finance, using new high-frequency data in close to real time. This paper surveys household behavior during the pandemic, with a focus on consumption, government policies, credit and investment. The pandemic induced a rapid...

The federal government encourages human capital investment through lending and grant programs, but resources from these programs may also finance non-education activities for students whose liquidity is otherwise restricted. This paper explores this possibility, using administrative data for the...