Research

While debt relief programs are often viewed as beneficial, little is known about its impact on spending habits and long-run financial health. This paper studies the federal student loan repayment pause during COVID-19 using UC-CCP panel data and a difference-in-differences design with inverse probability weighting and IV strategies. We find that while the pause modestly eased short-run financial strain and increased consumption, it also fostered habit formation: borrowers expanded recurring spending and later faced elevated delinquency once repayments resumed. These dynamics cannot be explained by a standard neoclassical model of consumption smoothing but are consistent with reference-dependent preferences induced habit persistence. A structural counterfactual shows that alternative pause designs could have reduced during-pause habit formation and post-pause distress, highlighting welfare trade-offs in liquidity-driven debt relief. The results reveal that well-intentioned forbearance can generate unintended behavioral costs alongside its immediate benefits.

Buying a home is one of the most significant financial decisions individuals make, yet the role of personal, local housing market experiences in shaping this decision remains understudied. We develop a theoretical framework showing how individuals’ experiences of local housing returns and volatility influence their homeownership decisions over the life cycle. We test the predictions of our model using administrative data from the UC Consumer Credit Panel (UC-CCP), which provides detailed geographic and credit information for a 2% nationally representative sample of U.S. individuals. Our results show that a 1 percentage point increase in experienced housing returns raises the probability of homeownership among young adults by approximately 0.5 percentage points. Conversely, a 1 percentage point increase in experienced housing return volatility reduces the probability of homeownership by about 3 percentage points, highlighting the substantial role of volatility experiences in shaping housing choices. These effects are especially pronounced for individuals under the age of 40. Overall, our findings suggest that local housing experiences exert a significant influence on homeownership decisions and that depressed sentiment following recent experiences of house price volatility may help explain the sluggish recovery of housing markets and broader economic activity following the financial crisis.

Persistent disparities in financial literacy often exacerbate existing income and wealth inequality. This paper investigates how individuals self-select into financial education and the implications of such selection for welfare. We document selection on observables and examine whether there is negative selection on treatment effects into financial education. Using two complementary approaches, we assess how an individuals’ demand for financial education relates to the benefits they derive. First, we analyze administrative data on participation in a personal finance course at UC Berkeley linked to survey responses on financial decision-making. We use both waitlist data and a synthetic control to create a control group to study the impact of the personal finance class on financial outcomes in administrative credit bureau data. We then examine treatment effect heterogeneity on observables, including heterogeneity in class effort or attention. Second, we pair the rich administrative data with a lab experiment on both UC Berkeley students and a broader Prolific sample. We use the lab setting to experimentally incentivize low-WTP individuals to take up financial education to measure selection on treatment effects. To examine how new technology, such as AI-based and online-based learning, can influence selection patterns, we vary the format of the education materials to show how varying the perceived cognitive difficulty of education can influence selection patterns. These two complementary settings allow us to estimate whether there is selection on treatment effects and explore policy solutions to change selection patterns. Our findings would shed light on how self-selection impacts the efficacy of financial literacy programs and inform efforts to target financial literacy education to those who benefit most.

We ask if prosocial motives influence individual decisions in collective capital raising, using crowdfunding as a setting to test whether contributors behave purely strategically or also out of altruism. Using high-frequency data on over 9,000 Kickstarter projects, we study how contribution dynamics respond to funding goals and deadlines. A regression discontinuity design shows that for projects near their funding goal, contributions surge just before the goal is reached and collapse immediately after, with this effect strongest close to the deadline and weakening the further the deadline is away. This pattern is difficult to reconcile with purely private returns, which would predict higher contributions once success is guaranteed, holding project quality constant. We develop a structural model showing that neither private incentives nor routine prosocial motives explain the data; only pivotal altruism---utility from raising a project's probability of success---accounts for the observed deadline effects. Extending the framework to broader settings such as venture capital, we show that goals and deadlines serve as behavioral levers that activate pivotal motives in collective capital raising.

We study what drives support for labor movements through a large-scale randomized digital campaign conducted across all campuses of the University of California system, reaching over 34,000 individuals during the 2022 UC strike. Messages were randomized at the department level to test four mechanisms: horizontal comparison, vertical comparison, elicitation of benefit, and altruism impact. All treatments significantly increased engagement, with horizontal comparison generating the strongest effects. Voting turnout rose by 2--6 percentage points relative to a 12\% baseline, a sizable increase in participation. We further examine time-persistence and spillover effects across departments, showing that exposure produced sustained and diffusive mobilization beyond directly treated units.

This study evaluates the long-term effects of financial literacy education through a randomized field experiment conducted in partnership with California community colleges. Building on a lab experiment that examined both selection and treatment effects of financial literacy interventions, this field experiment introduces a dedicated financial literacy course to selected colleges. Students are randomly assigned to treatment (course enrollment) and control groups, allowing for causal inference of the course’s impact. To track long-term outcomes, we merge survey and course data with administrative records from the California Community College Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO) and anonymized credit report data from the University of California Consumer Credit Panel (UC-CCP), using a secure hashed linkage protocol. The analysis will focus on key welfare outcomes such as credit use, delinquency, and debt repayment behavior, measured over time. The study is approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and implementation is ongoing. This project contributes to the literature on financial education by providing real-world, longitudinal evidence on whether and how financial literacy can improve individual financial decision-making and outcomes.