Explore the vast range of titles available.

We examine how policymakers react to a pandemic with uncertainty around key epidemiological and economic policy parameters by embedding a macroeconomic SIR model in a robust control framework. Uncertainty about disease virulence and severity leads to stricter and more persistent quarantines, while uncertainty about the economic costs of mitigation leads to less stringent quarantines. On net, an uncertainty-averse planner adopts stronger mitigation measures. Intuitively, the cost of underestimating the pandemic is out-of-control growth and permanent loss of life, while the cost of underestimating the economic consequences of quarantine is more transitory.

This paper studies whether house prices reflect belief differences about climate change. We show that in an equilibrium model of housing choice in which agents derive utility from ownership in a neighborhood of similar agents, prices exhibit different elasticities to climate risk. We use comprehensive transaction data to relate prices to inundation projections of individual homes and measures of beliefs about climate change. We find that houses projected to be underwater in believer neighborhoods sell at a discount compared to houses in denier neighborhoods. Our results suggest that house prices reflect heterogeneity in beliefs about long-run climate change risks.

At a time when the returns to college and graduate school are at historic highs, why do so many students struggle with their student loans? The increase in aggregate student debt and the struggles of today's student loan borrowers can be traced to changes in federal policies intended to broaden access to federal aid and educational opportunities, and which increased enrollment and borrowing in higher-risk circumstances. Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program. The crisis illustrates the important role that educational institutions play in access to postsecondary education and student outcomes, and difficulty of using broadly-available loans to subsidize investments in education when there is so much heterogeneity in outcomes across institutions and programs and in the ability to repay of students.

This paper examines the rise in student loan default and delinquency. It draws on a unique set of administrative data on federal student borrowing matched to earnings records from de-identified tax records. Most of the increase in default is associated with borrowers at for-profit schools, 2-year institutions, and certain other nonselective institutions. Historically, students at these institutions have constituted a small share of all student borrowers. These nontraditional borrowers have largely come from lower-income families, attended institutions with relatively weak educational outcomes, faced poor labor market outcomes after leaving school, and defaulted at high rates. In contrast, default rates have remained low among borrowers who attended most 4-year public and nonprofit private institutions and among graduate school borrowers—who collectively represent the vast majority of the federal loan portfolio—despite the severe recession and these borrowers' relatively high loan balances. The higher earnings, low rates of unemployment, and greater family resources of this latter category of borrowers appear to have helped them avoid adverse loan outcomes even during times of hardship. Decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the characteristics of borrowers and the institutions they attended are associated with much of the doubling in default rates between 2000 and 2011, with changes in the type of schools attended, debt burdens, and labor market outcomes explaining the largest share.

We use staggered banking deregulation across states in the United States to examine the impact of the resulting increased credit supply on college enrollment from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Our research design produces estimates that are not confounded by wealth effects due to changes in income or housing wealth. We find that lifting banking restrictions raises college enrollment by about 2.6 percentage points (4.9%). We rule out alternative interpretations by examining results for different income groups and bankrupt households. We also find similar effects for two-year or fouryear college completion and supporting evidence in household educational borrowing.

We report evidence from a randomized field experiment conducted by a major student loan servicer, Navient, in which student loan borrowers received prepopulated applications for income-driven repayment (IDR) plans. Treatment increased IDR enrollment by 34 percentage points relative to the control group. Using the random treatment assignment as an instrument for IDR enrollment, we furthermore provide local average treatment effect (LATE) estimates of the effects of IDR enrollment on new delinquencies, monthly student loan payments, and consumer spending. Our study is the first field-experimental evaluation of a U.S. government program designed to address the soaring debt burdens of U.S. households.

We study how private equity buyouts create value in higher education, a sector with opaque product quality and intense government subsidy. With novel data on 88 private equity deals involving 994 schools, we show that buyouts lead to higher tuition and per-student debt. Exploiting loan limit increases, we find that private equity-owned schools better capture government aid. After buyouts, we observe lower education inputs, graduation rates, loan repayment rates, and earnings among graduates. Neither school selection nor student body changes fully explain the results. The results indicate that in a subsidized industry, maximizing value may not improve consumer outcomes.

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 nonemployment. We overcome these challenges with new administrative data on teachers’ assignments and their students’ outcomes, and quasi-random variation from the teacher assignment process in Greece. We find significant losses to output, as a one-year increase in time without formal employment lowers students’ test scores by 0.05 standard deviations. Using a simple production model, we estimate a skill depreciation rate of 4.3 percent and experience returns of 6.8 percent.

This paper investigates the importance of ethnic homophily in the hiring discrimination process. Our evidence comes from a correspondence test performed in France in which we use three different kinds of ethnic identification: French sounding names, North African sounding names, and “foreign” sounding names with no clear ethnic association. Within the groups of men and women, we show that all non-French applicants are equally discriminated against when compared to French applicants. Moreover, we find direct evidence of ethnic homophily: recruiters with European names are more likely to call back French named applicants. These results show the importance of favoritism for in-group members. To test for the effect of information about applicant’s skills, we also add a signal related to language ability in all resumes sent to half the job offers. The design allows to uniquely identify the effect of the language signal by gender. Although the signal inclusion significantly reduces the discrimination against non-French females, it is much weaker for male minorities.

This paper studies how access to financial services among a previously unbanked group affects human capital, labor market, and wealth outcomes. We use novel data from the Freedman’s Savings Bank—created following the American Civil War to serve free Blacks—employing an instrumental variables strategy exploiting the staggered rollout of bank branches. Families with accounts are more likely to have children in school, be literate, work, and have higher occupational income, business ownership, and real estate wealth. Placebo effects are not present using planned but unbuilt branches, or for Whites, suggesting significant positive effects of financial inclusion.