We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with human capital risk, age-dependent...

Analyzing a list of all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans in 1991 to 2009 linked with annual information on all U.S. employers from 1976 to 2012, we apply detailed matching and regression methods to estimate the variation in SBA loan effects on job creation and firm survival across firm...

Economic hardship is strongly reflected by the housing market. It is the concern of much research, but its analysis is often obstructed by insufficient lagged data. This paper evaluates search intensity for "hardship letter" from Google Insights to detect ensuing mortgage delinquencies. Such...

Microinsurance is an emerging concept protecting households from the potentially catastrophic expenditures associated with family related shocks. Therefore, this paper presents evidence on the determinants of insurance participation using probit models on household survey data from Sri Lanka,...

The employer-sponsored life insurance (ESLI) market is particularly susceptible to adverse selection due to community-rated premiums, guaranteed issue coverage, and the existence of a well-functioning individual market as a substitute. Using administrative payroll and healthcare claims data from...

The profitability of life insurance offerings is contingent on accurate projections and pricing of mortality risk. The COVID-19 pandemic created significant uncertainty, with dire mortality predictions from early forecasts resulting in widespread government intervention and greater individual...

Despite large and growing student loan balances, there is relatively little evidence on the effects of access to student loans on borrowing and educational outcomes. We examine the effect of access to credit by using policy variation in the maximum federal student loan amounts available to U.S....

We evaluate a Finnish student financing reform which created substantial financial incentives for on-time graduation, and had the side effect of turning expected nominal interest rates on student loans strongly negative. We find that both the timing of graduation and the take-up of loans...

There is wide agreement the US student loan system faces significant problems. Seven million borrowers are in default and many more experience non-repayment. The stress of repayments faced by many students results at least in part from the design of US student loans. Specifically, loans are...

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms especially in their banking sectors that have been quite critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking...