Publications

A Dynamic Model of the Racial Wealth Gap

with Ellen Lu and James Paron

Review of Financial Studies, 2026

Explores how disparities in economic factors explain differences in Black and White households' balance-sheet composition, finding that such factors account for roughly half the differential between the racial wealth and income gaps.

How Do Income-Driven Repayment Plans Benefit Student Debt Borrowers?

with Mehran Ebrahimian and Constantine Yannelis

Journal of Financial Economics, 2026

Shows that the expansion of income-driven repayment accounts for roughly half of the increase in student debt since 2010, and analyzes its consumption-smoothing and welfare effects.

Social Security and Trends in Wealth Inequality

with Max Miller and Natasha Sarin

Journal of Finance, 2025

Demonstrates that top wealth shares remain relatively stable over three decades once Social Security wealth is properly included in the measurement.

YouTube DFA Prize webinar

Countercyclical Income Risk and Portfolio Choices: Evidence from Sweden

with Paolo Sodini and Yapei Zhang

Journal of Finance, 2024

Documents how workers facing higher tail income risk during poor equity-market performance maintain lower portfolio equity shares.

Empirical companion paper of Catherine (RFS, 2022).

The Distributional Effects of Student Loan Forgiveness

with Constantine Yannelis

Journal of Financial Economics, 2023

Shows that forgiveness policies disproportionately benefit higher earners and provide substantially smaller benefits to Black and Hispanic households. In the presence of income-driven repayment plans, balance reductions overstate the true gains from forgiveness at the lower end of the distribution.

Countercyclical Labor Income Risk and Portfolio Choices over the Life Cycle

Review of Financial Studies, 2022

Shows that introducing tail income shocks during recessions—cyclical skewness—strongly reduces workers' optimal equity holdings, reconciling the predictions of standard portfolio-choice models with the data.

Theoretical companion paper of Catherine, Sodini and Zhang (JF, 2024).

Social Security and the Racial Wealth Gap

with Natasha Sarin

Chapter in Reducing Retirement Inequality: Building Wealth and Old-Age Resilience, Oxford University Press, 2025

Examines how including Social Security wealth narrows measured racial wealth disparities over three decades.