My fields of specialization are labor economics and consumer finance. I am primarily an empirical researcher, and my projects explore the dynamic, interdependent choices of workers or of household members. The agents I study range from job seekers and their peers, parents and children, and consumers negotiating financial markets. Still, in each case, I am interested in how these agents plan for the future, as well as how their repeated interaction shapes their economic circumstances.
I spent my early career working in labor economics, and I continue to balance labor projects with other interests. My research in this area has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Labor Economics and the Review of Economic Studies and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
A few examples of this work embody its broader themes. Using private firm data, collaborators and I asked whether jobs obtained through worker referrals are more stable — and more productive — than those found through traditional search. In laboratory experiments at New York University, my advisors and I tracked searchers’ discouragement over the course of a search spell. At the University of Wisconsin, my coauthors and I became interested in the active choices made by parents in funding their children’s college education. We modeled the consequences of repeated parent-child interactions for the efficiency of human capital investment and tested the effectiveness of college financial aid for students whose parents do and do not contribute.
At the start of the Great Recession, I joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Fed’s reaction to the housing crisis, naturally, was to seek more data and more research pertaining to American households’ financial lives. This marked a turning point in my research, as I learned from my colleagues in the fields of housing and household finance and had the privilege of working with them in developing a national panel of administrative data on consumer debt. Our resulting research was published in the Review of Financial Studies and Ohio State’s own Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.
In that time, we were able to look at the strategies by which consumers restructured their balance sheets to meet the waxing and waning opportunities presented to them by the housing boom, bust and recovery of the mid-2000s and beyond. We tracked advancing financial and economic education standards for U.S. students and related these to the debt market experiences of a million 18- to 28-year-olds. We measured the distance between U.S. consumer debt in leading survey data and U.S. consumer debt in our administrative panel, in order to determine whether American consumers know what they owe. And we continue to study the interplay among the changing cost of college, U.S. students’ reliance on student borrowing to meet increasing costs and post-college family formation and homeownership.
I am honored to return to The Ohio State University. My late father was a member of Ohio State’s Department of English. I was born in the Ohio State hospital and, some years later, graduated from Ohio State with a bachelor’s degree in economics and English. I am humbled to share a department with economics faculty members whom I revered as an undergraduate, and I am continually impressed with the intellect and character of today’s Ohio State students. The Ohio State economics degree has served me well; I can’t wait to see what it will do for our students.
