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 present a life-cycle model in which households can invest in short- or long-term assets to hedge against interest-rate risk. Our model matches important stylized facts. First, the share of long-term assets in households' wealth is hump-shaped over the life-cycle. Within cohorts, it increases...

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 efficiency of federal lending guarantees depends on whether guarantees increase lending supply, or simply act as a subsidy to lenders. We use notches in the guarantee rate schedule for loans backed by the Small Business Administration to estimate the elasticity of bank lending volume to loan...

This paper investigates the effects of college tuition on student debt and human capital accumulation. We exploit data from a random sample of undergraduate students in the United States and implement a research design that instruments for tuition with relatively large changes to the tuition of...

We exploit credit bureau data linked to administrative data of undergraduate students in the U.S. and implement a research design that instruments for tuition with relatively large changes to the tuition of students who enrolled at the same school in different years. $10,000 in higher tuition...

Human capital can depreciate if skills are unused. But estimating human capital depreciation is challenging, as worker skills are difficult to measure and less productive workers are more likely to spend time in non-employment. We overcome these challenges with new administrative data on...

This paper investigates the effects of college tuition on student debt and human capital accumulation. We exploit data from a random sample of undergraduate students in the United States and implement a research design that instruments for tuition with relatively large changes to the tuition of...