Search Results
Working Paper
Default Risk and Private Student Loans: Implications for Higher Education Policies
The private market for student loans has become an important source of college financing in the United States. Unlike government student loans, the terms on student loans in the private market are based on credit status. We quantify the importance of the private market for student loans and of credit status for college investment in a general equilibrium heterogeneous life-cycle economy. We find that students with good credit status invest in more college education (compared to those with bad credit status) and that this effect is more pronounced for low-income students. Furthermore, results ...
Briefing
Who Values Access to College?
A quantitative model of college enrollment suggests that the value of college access varies greatly across individuals. Forty percent place no value on the option to attend despite large public subsidies, while 25 percent would enroll even without the subsidies. In the model, redirecting public funds from those who attend college irrespective of subsidies to those who don’t attend even with subsidies both preserves college enrollment and improves overall outcomes. While these two groups are clearly visible only in the model, and not in the data, this analysis suggests that more-targeted ...
Working Paper
Stock Market Investment: The Role of Human Capital
Participation in the stock market is limited, especially early in life. By contrast, human capital investment is widespread, especially early in life. Returns to equity are constant across households, while returns to human capital vary. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that once human capital investment is allowed for and, critically, disciplined to match observed dispersion in earnings, an entirely standard model of portfolio choice delivers stock market participation rates consistent with the data over the entire life cycle. Moreover, we show that endogenizing human capital ...
Discussion Paper
Drivers of Bank Supply of Business Loans
Numerous studies show that tightening loan supply may significantly affect credit outcomes, including declines in total lending capacity and changes in loan terms (see for example, Bassett et al. (2014), Castro et al. (2022), Lown and Morgan (2006)). Moreover, research has linked these supply-driven declines in credit to negative effects on economic outcomes, including employment or output (see Alfaro et al. (2021) or Herheknhoff (2019)).
Discussion Paper
Are Income and Credit Scores Highly Correlated?
To the best of our knowledge, statistical analysis on the relationship between income and credit scores using proper data remains scant. Using a unique proprietary data set, this note attempts to fill the gap in our understanding of this relationship.
Working Paper
The Interplay Between Student Loans and Credit Card Debt: Implications for Default in the Great Recession
We analyze the interactions between two different forms of unsecured credit and their implications for default behavior of young U.S. households. One type of credit mimics credit cards in the United States and the default option resembles a bankruptcy filing under Chapter 7; the other type of credit mimics student loans in the United States and the default option resembles Chapter 13. In the credit card market a financial intermediary offers a menu of interest rates based on individual default risk, which account for borrowing and repayment behavior in both markets. In the student loan ...
Working Paper
Insuring student loans against the financial risk of failing to complete college
Participants in student loan programs must repay loans in full regardless of whether they complete college. But many students who take out a loan do not earn a degree (the dropout rate among college students is between 33 to 50 percent). We examine whether insurance, in the form of loan forgiveness in the event of failure to complete college, can be offered, taking into account moral hazard and adverse selection. To do so, we develop a model that accounts for college enrollment and graduation rates among recent US high school graduates. In our model students may fail to earn a degree because ...
Discussion Paper
Comparing Three Credit Scoring Models /Rachael Beer, Felicia Ionescu, and Geng Li.
Our analysis uses a different, unique proprietary dataset that features three frequently used credit scores for each individual. Compared with the dataset used in the CFPB report, this dataset includes more recent time periods and provides a longer historical perspective of credit score comparisons.
Working Paper
Insuring college failure risk
Participants in student loan programs must repay loans in full regardless of whether they complete college. But many students who take out a loan do not earn a degree (the dropout rate among college students is between 33 to 50 percent). The authors examine whether insurance against college-failure risk can be offered, taking into account moral hazard and adverse selection. To do so, they developed a model that accounts for college enrollment, dropout, and completion rates among new high school graduates in the US and use that model to study the feasibility and optimality of offering ...
Discussion Paper
How Did Banks Fund C&I Drawdowns at the Onset of the COVID-19 Crisis?
Banks experienced significant balance sheet expansions in March 2020 due to unprecedented increases in commercial and industrial (C&I) loans and deposit funding. According to the Federal Reserve's H.8 data, "Assets and Liabilities of Commercial Banks in the U.S.", C&I loans increased by nearly $480 billion in March—the largest monthly increase in the history of this series, surpassing the nearly $90 billion increase in C&I loans in the six weeks following Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008.