Working Papers

The Unsecured Consequence: Youth Mental Health and Financial Distress (Job Market Paper)

Solo-Authored

This paper examines the long-term impact of youth mental health on financial distress using nationally representative survey data. I find that individuals with a higher propensity for youth mental health problems are significantly more likely to experience unsecured debt distress. To mitigate endogeneity concerns, I instrument youth mental health propensity with prenatal exposure to alcohol or cigarettes. Results further show that the non-Hispanic, non-Black population is particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of youth mental health on unsecured debt distress. Differences in borrowing behavior, credit access, perceived cost of default, financial planning, and noncognitive abilities help explain these patterns. Overall, the findings highlight the macroeconomic significance of youth mental health and provide empirical evidence to guide policy design.

Childhood Mental Health and Long Run Financial Outcomes

with Dragana Cvijanovic and Moritz Wiedemann

We investigate the relation between childhood mental health conditions and financial outcomes later in life. We find that individuals with childhood mental health conditions are significantly less likely to hold any assets, accumulate fewer total assets both unconditionally and conditionally on asset ownership, and are less likely to be home owners over the life cycle. They also tend to accumulate more debt, and in particular more non-mortgage debt. These results are largely driven by white and male demographic groups. Financial literacy mitigates most of these effects. Childhood mental health is also linked to a lower likelihood of overconfidence, shorter life span expectancy and financial planning horizons, more pessimistic economic outlook, and reduced cognitive abilities, all of which may jointly explain the observed differences in financial outcomes.

Smaller Banks, Smarter Lending? Evidence from the Commercial Real Estate Market

with Eva Steiner and Alexei Tchistyi

We study the role of community banks in commercial real estate (CRE) lending during the Covid-19 pandemic, a period of heightened uncertainty in a market characterized by informational frictions. Using bank-level Call Reports, property-level loan data from MSCI, and leasing outcomes from Compstak, we compare lending decisions and associated outcomes of community and large banks during this period. We show that community banks increased CRE lending during the pandemic, primarily within their local markets, and in large part by financing properties previously funded by large banks. Community banks also experienced lower foreclosure rates on loans issued during this period and stronger operating performance of the properties financed. We reconcile these findings with a model of banking competition in which community banks can leverage superior local information against the lower cost of capital of large banks when uncertainty is high.

Work in Progress

Outsourcing vs. In-House Management in Real Estate: Governance, Information, and Performance

with Peng Liu and Bobby Yu

This paper investigates how organizational structure and geographic proximity affect operational performance in real estate assets, using hotels as a primary setting. Drawing on theories of firm boundaries, decentralization, and information acquisition, we examine whether third-party management firms’ local expertise can offset the governance and brand advantages of in-house management. Using a representative U.S. hotel dataset with detailed operational metrics, we find three main results: (1) smaller management firms outperform larger ones in operational efficiency; (2) proximity between properties and management headquarters is strongly associated with better performance; and (3) brand-managed hotels consistently achieve higher Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) than those managed by third parties. These findings highlight how information frictions, brand equity, and organizational design jointly shape real estate performance, providing insights for owners and investors when deciding between internal and outsourced management structures.

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