I'm a PhD student in business economics at Harvard with research interests in household finance, industrial organization, and spatial economics.

I am an NBER graduate fellow in consumer financial management, a graduate research fellow at the Boston Fed, and a member of the Harvard Kennedy School's Reimagining the Economy project.

I received a BA in economics and mathematics (summa) from Yale in 2018. I've also worked at McKinsey and Microsoft Research.

Working papers

Saving and Consumption Responses to Student Loan Forbearance [November 2022 Slides]

• Media: Wall Street Journal

+ Abstract + Survey instruments

To study the impacts of debt relief versus cash transfers, I compare saving and consumption responses to student loan forbearance and stimulus checks in the 2020 CARES Act. Borrowers non-optimally use much of the liquidity received from forbearance to voluntarily prepay 0%-interest student debt instead of high-interest obligations, despite prioritizing high-interest debts when receiving stimulus checks. Consistent with this flypaper effect, the marginal propensity to spend (MPX) out of forbearance liquidity is less than half that of stimulus checks. A calibration exercise estimates that the flypaper effect makes forbearance less effective and more costly as a counter-cyclical fiscal tool.

Buy Now, Pay Later Credit: User Characteristics and Effects on Spending Patterns (with M Di Maggio and E Williams). NBER Working Paper #30508.

• Media: The Atlantic, NPR, HBS Working Knowledge, National Affairs, Bank Policy Institute, Payments Dive

+ Abstract

Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by constructing a large panel of BNPL users from transaction-level data. We document characteristics of users and usage patterns, and use BNPL roll-out to provide new insights into consumer responses to unsecured credit access. BNPL access increases both total spending levels and the retail share in total spending, with magnitudes too large for standard intertemporal and static substitution effects to explain. These findings hold for consumers with and without inferred liquidity constraints. Our findings are more consistent with a "liquidity flypaper effect" where additional retail liquidity through BNPL "sticks where it hits", than a standard lifecycle model with liquidity constraints.

Competition and Speculation in Cryptocurrencies (with A Wu).

+ Abstract

This paper uses mutual fund manager data to examine how managers' performance incentives generated speculative demand during the 2020-2022 cryptocurrency boom and bust. We find that managers with strong relative performance incentives began investing in crypto after their competitors began investing in it, consistent with a model of rational performance hedging. In contrast, managers who invest their personal wealth in the funds that they manage, who have strong direct performance incentives, were significantly less responsive to their competitors' investment decisions. Our findings suggest that relative performance incentives can encourage managers to mimic their competitors instead of trading on their beliefs. In equilibrium, this competitive hedging motive can magnify the scope of speculative demand.

The Supply Side of Consumer Debt Repayment (with D Russel and C Shi ).

+ Abstract

Minimum payments on credit card debt allow consumers to repay slowly: despite being unsecured, the average $7,000 balance generally amortizes in over 20 years. We study how lenders choose these minimum payments and the impacts of these choices on equilibrium consumer debt outcomes. When short-term illiquidity makes many borrowers unable to make higher payments, lenders set low minimums to limit default costs. Alternatively, if many borrowers make near-minimum payments for reasons besides illiquidity (e.g., due to anchoring), lenders set low minimums to generate interest revenue. To separate these two forces, we use payment-level data from a credit bureau to document a new fact about intra-temporal debt repayment. Consumers often revolve high-interest credit card debt while making excess payments on low-interest installment debt, providing evidence that low payments aren't solely liquidity-driven. We use this fact to estimate an empirical model that predicts realistically low lender minimums. The model suggests that without anchoring, minimums would be over twice as high for most borrowers. Lenders amplify consumer biases, accounting for 20% of the total increase in credit card debt and 85% of defaults from anchoring in our model.