Working Papers
[April 2026] Liquidity Based Contracting: A Path to Greater Efficiency in Payday Lending [Job Market Paper]
Presented at: Columbia Business School ● Consumer Finance Protection Bureau x2 ● Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia x2 ● Federal Reserve Board x2 ● Georgia Tech, Scheller ● Stockholm School of Economics ● Office of Financial Research, Treasury ● Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ● AFFECT ● Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta ● WFA 2024: Early Career Women in Finance Conference● Junior Household Finance Seminar Series x2● Morehouse College Research Colloquium
The $15 billion payday loan market is criticized for high prices and frequent renewals. I study how borrower welfare can improve by examining these criticisms. Using transaction data, I show borrowers use payday loans to smooth income shocks and often renew to cover essentials, not fund discretionary spending. These facts motivate a short-term lending model where the equilibrium contract endogenously replicates real payday loans when borrowers have low expected income and high volatility, and lenders gain ex-post pricing power in an ex-ante competitive market. A counterfactual contract with lower rollover and higher final fees increases borrower welfare without reducing profit.
[March 2026] Bank Fees and Household Financial Well Being(joint with Michaela Pagel and Emily Williams)
NBER Working Paper 34993
Presented at: Junior Household Finance Seminar Series ● Georgia Tech, Scheller ● 2025 Boulder Colorado Consumer Finance Conference (Poster) ● Rice University ● SFS Cavalcade 2026
In this study, we examine policy changes from large U.S. banks between 2017 and 2022, which eliminated non-sufficient funds (NSF) fees and relaxed overdraft policies. Using individual transaction-level data, we find that the elimination of NSF fees, not surprisingly, resulted in immediate reductions in NSF charges across the income distribution. However, relaxing overdraft policies resulted in reductions in overdraft fees only for wealthier households, along the dimensions of income and liquidity, and only those enjoyed subsequent declines in late fees, interest payments, account maintenance fees, and the use of alternative financial services, such as payday loans. Our results thus suggest that the policy changes were not substantial enough to significantly reduce the financial stress of the more vulnerable households. As our setting features multiple treatments and variation in treatment intensities, we theoretically motivate and empirically implement a new stacked event study estimator closely related to de Chaisemartin et al (2024) to address the biases arising from staggered DID specifications.
[December 2025]Social Funding of Emergency and Primary Healthcare to Uninsured Patient Populations(joint with Ujjal Mukherjee and Sridhar Seshadri)
[previously circulated as Efficient Mechanism for Joint Allocation of Social Funding of Emergency and Primary Healthcare Delivery to Uninsured Patient Populations]
Presented at: 2025 Midwest Healthcare Management Conference ● Purdue University ● Columbia Business School ● UIUC
Should there be universal primary care for the uninsured? We examine whether expanding preventative primary care coverage can reduce costly emergency room (ER) visits and improve welfare. Using California as our setting, we find that after the implementation of the Global Payment Program (GPP), a state initiative that funds primary care for the uninsured, there is significant decline in ER visits. Given that these reductions alone do not assess the cost tradeoff of funding emergency versus primary care, we develop a theoretical framework to study this question. Our model is based on the federal Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) program, the primary mechanism through which hospitals are reimbursed for uninsured emergency care. We show that competition for DSH funds distorts hospitals' incentives to increase emergency room capacity, favoring large, low-cost hospitals serving fewer uninsured patients. Calibrating the model with California hospital data, we find that direct compensation for uninsured emergency care could yield annual savings between 7% and 32%. Integrating GPP into the framework, we find it is welfare-improving for the social planner to fully subsidize primary care for almost all uninsured patients.
Work-in-Progress
[March 2026] The Long Shadow of Housing Shocks on Consumer Debt Behavior (joint with Andres Shahidinejad)
Presented at: Georgia Tech, Scheller
A large literature documents how personal economic experiences shape financial behavior, yet less is understood about how such experiences affect household borrowing decisions and debt composition. Using the Great Recession as a setting, we ask whether house price shocks have persistent effects on household debt choice. To identify the causal effect of experiencing a shock, we compare households who reside in the same location in 2023 but had differing geographic origins in 2008. We combine zipcode-level house price data from Zillow with Equifax credit bureau records and transaction-level data from a bank and credit card account aggregator. We find that households exposed to more negative shocks modestly increase total debt balances, driven by higher auto, consumer, student, and other loans that offset lower credit card balances, with no significant difference in mortgage debt levels. More strikingly, we document substantial shifts in debt composition — toward mortgage and away from credit card debt — among more-shocked households. We find suggestive evidence that these compositional differences reflect variation in risk preferences, as proxied by participation in risky financial activities such as retail trading and cryptocurrency.