This paper empirically studies how college savings motives affect household stock market participation. More than 65% of households saving for college allocate at least a portion of their college savings to stocks, which are also the most popular class of risky assets for college savings...

This paper studies how the portfolio allocation of college savings affects children's college attendance and student debt using novel data on 529 college savings accounts linked with student-level longitudinal data. Employing exogenous variation in the portfolio allocation of 529 accounts driven...

Over the past twenty years, colleges have invested an increasing share of their endowment assets in “alternative investments.” Prior to 2009, an alternatives emphasis had been widely credited for the sterling endowment investment returns earned by many colleges. However, with college...

We consider philanthropy by college alums from an innovative and provocative perspective: what if prospective college students were considered members of assets classes with different risk-return combinations? Using forty years of merged admissions-philanthropy records on students at a highly...

In the presence of conditional charity, universities must undertake costly revenue raising to qualify as prospective recipients of private donations. This paper considers the donation portfolios of U.S. universities between 2003 and 2014 to investigate whether a strategy that includes beliefs...

When applying Excel to finance, there exist many issues, such as how to focus on hands-on experience, how to inspire students to learn Excel, how to teach macros and how to get data into our spreadsheets in the first place. This paper offers a brand new approach with the following features....

This work analyzes the optimal allocation of assets over the life cycle of an investor who has the option to invest in his education. We characterize the optimal spending rule for education, and compare the optimal asset allocation of such investors with the optimal portfolios of investors with...

In this paper I investigate the relationship between the local political climate and regional heterogeneity in the portfolio composition of individual investors. I find that right-wing supporters are more likely to participate in financial markets and hold a larger share of their wealth in...

Employee share ownership is growing increasingly important. This paper studies employee share ownership in an economy with one monopoly union for each firm. We modify an implicit contract model by adding dividend income to the usual wage income. Union members differ in exogenous stock endowments...

Legal provisions that protect politicians from arrest and prosecution exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Why, and with what effects, do societies choose to place their politicians above the law? We examine the institution of immunity both theoretically and empirically. Our...