Journal Article
Student debt incidence: recent data and conceptual issues
Manes, Jordan B.; Phelan, Tom; Moschini, Emily (2022-12-19)
In recent years, the rising level of student debt has led to calls for increased government assistance in the form of partial or full student debt cancellation. In this Commentary, we use the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to study the incidence of student debt and cancellation benefits along quantiles of household income, net worth, and our estimate of lifetime wealth. We show that student debt is highly concentrated among households with low net worth, but much more evenly distributed across income and lifetime wealth. We then highlight several challenges in using such statistics to ...
Economic Commentary , Volume 2022 , Issue 16

Building Mentorships and Camaraderie in Economics
McKiernan, Kathleen; Moschini, Emily; Xu, Ming; McGrattan, Ellen R. (2022-06-09)
Ellen McGrattan, a professor at the University of Minnesota, discusses the profession with three former students who are now assistant professors.
On the Economy

Journal Article
The Evolution of Student Debt 2019–2022: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
Moschini, Emily; Phelan, Tom (2024-06-17)
In recent years, economists and policymakers have been interested in the burden of student debt across socioeconomic groups. In this Economic Commentary, we use the two most recent waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, collected in 2019 and 2022, to study changes in the joint distribution of student debt and two measures of “ability-to-pay,” income and net worth. We find that between 2019 and 2022, both the fraction of families with student debt and real student debt per family were essentially unchanged, and aggregate student debt fell as a fraction of aggregate income and net worth. ...
Economic Commentary , Volume 2024 , Issue 10 , Pages 6