We find that graduates from universities that remove student loans from their financial aid policies are more likely to start entrepreneurial ventures and are more likely to subsequently get venture capital (VC) backing, particularly by reputed VCs, and get higher VC investment. Such ventures...

We find that student debt is negatively related to the propensity to start a firm, particularly larger and more successful ventures. An exogenous change due to the Higher Education Amendments of 1998, which made student debt completely non-dischargeable through personal bankruptcy, reduced the...

Using exogenous changes in the personal bankruptcy treatment of student loans as well as the level of student debt, we find that student debt has a negative effect on household retirement savings. This negative relation is present for younger and older individuals, and is larger for the latter...

Using household data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that student debt negatively affects future investment in high return, risky financial assets, utilizing exogenous shocks to student loans and its bankruptcy treatment, to establish causation. We show that student loans...