JOB MARKET PAPER

Financial Frictions and Human Capital Investments

This project is supported by grants from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the Center for Financial Institutions at Kellogg School of Management

Presentations: Chicago Fed (scheduled), Financial Research Association FRA 2022, CEPR European Conference on Household Finance 2022, IZA Workshop on Education Economics 2022, USC Marshall 2022 Finance Conference, ASSA 2021, Macro Finance Society 2021, Stanford Rising Scholars 2020

Awards: Michael J. Barclay Young Scholar Award (FRA Conference) 2022, CEPR Best Student Paper in Household Finance 2022

How do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I document that students trade-off initial earnings against lifetime earnings when choosing college majors, and that students from low-income families are more likely to choose majors associated with higher initial earnings but lower lifetime earnings. I provide causal estimates of how student debt affects this trade-off using the staggered implementation of Universal No-Loan Policies across 22 universities from 2001 to 2019. I find that students who are required to take on more student loans to finance their education choose majors with higher initial earnings but lower lifetime earnings. Furthermore, student debt differentially affects students depending on their family backgrounds: Students who grew up in low-income families display greater sensitivity to changes in student debt. Finally, I show that student debt leads to different job profiles and earnings later in life. Combined, these findings highlight the role of financial frictions in human capital investments and subsequent labor market trajectories.

WORKING PAPERS

Peer Effects and the Gender Gap in Corporate Leadership: Evidence from MBA Students (with Ashley Wong and Francesca Truffa)

Presentations: ASSA 2023 (scheduled), AlpPop 2023 (scheduled), Stanford University (Scheduled), NBER Summer Institute 2022, ASSA 2021, IZA Workshop on Gender and Family Economics 2021

Awards: Best Paper Award for the Discrimination and Diversity Workshop University of East Anglia (2022), UniCredit Foundation Best Paper Award on Gender Economics (2021), Susan Schmidt Bies Prize for Doctoral Student Research on Economics and Public Policy (2019)

Women continue to be underrepresented in corporate leadership positions. This paper studies the role of social connections in women's career advancement. We investigate whether access to a larger share of female peers in business school affects the gender gap in senior managerial positions. Merging administrative data from a top-10 US business school with public LinkedIn profiles, we first document that female MBAs are 24 percent less likely than male MBAs to enter senior management within 15 years of graduation. Next, we use the random assignment of students into sections to show that a larger proportion of female MBA section peers increases the likelihood of entering senior management for women but not for men. This effect is driven by female-friendly firms, such as those with more generous maternity leave policies and greater work schedule flexibility. A larger proportion of female MBA peers induces women to transition to these firms where they attain senior management roles. We find suggestive evidence that some of the mechanisms behind these results include job referrals and gender-specific information transmission. These findings highlight the role of social connections in reducing the gender gap in senior management positions.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Who Benefits from Financial Technology? A Trade-off between Credit Access and Price Discrimination (with Stephanie Johnson and Adam Jorring)

How should regulators evaluate the costs and benefits when firms require consumers to provide additional data? Using a model of asymmetric information in non-Walrasian markets, we show that consumer surplus can increase, even when more data leads to higher average prices. We test the model's predictions in mortgage markets using the staggered implementation of Automated Underwriting Systems in the 1990s, where new credit risk models increased the use of and interaction between additional financial variables. We find that average interest rates went up in line with the model's predictions. However, the effects are driven by increased credit supply on the extensive margin, benefiting marginal borrowers from groups historically excluded from credit markets. Our results challenge the standard regulatory approach of relying on prices as a sufficient statistics for consumer surplus.

College Education and Political Persuasion (with Simcha Barkai) [data collection phase]

The aim of this project is to understand the role of higher education in shaping political attitudes. The project will provide two types of analysis. The first is analysis of new survey data collected from Boston College students and Alumni. The second focuses on observational data, such as data available through online profiles of individuals.