RESEARCH

Abstract. This paper examines how student debt is associated with homeownership and home equity accumulation over the lifecycle. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, I document that a homeownership gap between borrowers and non-borrowers emerges by mid-career and persists through retirement, while homeowners with student debt hold around $30,000–$60,000 less home equity at every age. I develop an infinite-horizon perpetual youth model in which households face income and housing-price shocks, can rent or own, and are endowed with education and student debt at birth. The model illustrates how student debt interacts with debt-to-income and loan-to-value constraints, tightening mortgage limits and slowing equity accumulation. Consistent with these mechanisms, homeowners with student debt are 8 percentage points more likely to hold a mortgage near retirement. The analysis focuses on patterns of asset accumulation rather than welfare, highlighting how student debt reshapes household balance sheets over time.

Abstract. We build a multi-sector multi-country OLG model with different groups of workers and an education decision to estimate the impact globalization has had on the gendered-college attainment gap in the United States and Europe. We begin by documenting several stylized facts, namely that the reallocation of demand towards services across countries may impact the gendered skill-premia, as services employ disportionately more college-educated women. We then derive a sufficient statistic that highlights our main mechanism: building off Cravino & Sotelo, 2019 we show that symmetric reductions in trade costs for goods leads to a relative expansion in value added for services, and when services is more female college intensive than goods are male non-college intensive, this can lead to an increase in the gendered-college attainment gap when workers are substitutes in production. We propose several counterfactuals to estimate the role falling trade costs have on college attainment. 

Abstract. Understanding how need-based student aid programs interact or "stack" to determine a total aid package is crucial for maximizing financial aid. If students lack this knowledge, when new programs are introduced, they may make changes to their take-up decisions that reduce their total aid receipt. This paper examines whether schools' adoption of last-dollar local student aid programs causes students to substitute away from Michigan's first-dollar Tuition Incentive Program, when doing so can reduce their total aid receipt.  A difference-in-differences approach that leverages the staggered adoption of these local aid programs suggests that TIP take-up decreases by about 15% among 2-year enrollees and their TIP aid received falls by around $167 per pupil, or about 20%. However, differential trends in outcomes before program adoption threatens a causal interpretation of these results. With these caveats in mind, our results suggest that the adoption of last-dollar local programs may have inadvertent consequences for students who misunderstand differences between first- and last-dollar aid programs with the most harm concentrated among the neediest students.

Abstract. In the United States, social welfare programs often have low take-up, where only a fraction of eligible beneficiaries receive the resources that they are eligible for. We examine this problem through the lens of Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), a state grant aid program that provides free community college to low-income students based on their childhood participation in Medicaid. To investigate TIP take-up, we conduct a large-scale mixed-methods study using comprehensive data on over one million Michigan public school students over 11 cohorts, and 55 interviews with program administrators, high school counselors, and financial aid staff. We find that while one third of Michigan high school graduates are eligible for TIP, its take-up rate is only 14 percent, limiting its impact on college affordability. Our results show that TIP take-up is higher for students who have early and consistent Medicaid enrollment, and for students in schools with a high proportion of TIP-eligible students. We identify key barriers that play a significant role in shaping take-up: the presence of administrative burdens, and the constraints faced by front-line administrators in alleviating these burdens when administrative responsibility for grant aid is fractured and ill-defined. Other safety net programs could experience similar challenges.

• EPI Policy Brief: Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program: An Initial Look at Take-up (with Kathy Michelmore, Nathan Sotherland, Kevin Stange, and Marissa Thompson). 2025.