This paper investigates the possible opportunity cost of using standard college savings plans against the advantages of using debt to pay for college. In addition, it presents a practical argument for using debt in place of college savings plans in certain instances.By doing so, investors may...

Globally, 1.7 billion adults still lack access to formal financial services, with a large percentage living in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Current financial inclusion strategies seek to enhance these vulnerable populations' access to financial services with the aim of building more...

This paper empirically studies how college savings motives affect household stock market participation. More than 65% of households saving for college allocate at least a portion of their college savings to stocks, which are also the most popular class of risky assets for college savings...

Understanding the dynamics of high dimensional non-normal dependency structure is a challenging task. This research aims at attacking this problem by building up a hidden Markov model (HMM) for Hierarchical Archimedean Copulae (HAC), where the HAC represent a wide class of models for high...

This paper provides an overview of the U.S. health care reform debate and legislation, with a focus on health insurance. Following a synopsis of the main problems that confront U.S. health care and insurance, it outlines the health care reform bills in the U.S. House and Senate, including the...

This study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the underlying factors that can explain the high levels of financial exclusion that persist in Mexico, with focus on the role of financial literacy. Our analysis is based on the 2018 National Survey of Financial Inclusion in Mexico (ENIF)....

“Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL) is a largely unregulated FinTech innovation that provides consumers with easy access to credit for specific retail purchases. The BNPL market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2025, but we know little about the effects of BNPL on consumers’ financial health....

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives have risen to near the top of the agenda for corporate executives and boards, driven in large part by their perceptions of shareholder interest. We quantify the value that shareholders place on ESG using a revealed preference approach, where...

We estimate the causal effect of 334 different types of health shocks on a set of economic and health outcomes: medical expenses, mortality, disability, labor market participation, labor earnings, and the need for nursing home care. To this end, we examine detailed data on 6.9 million people...

We study how past experiences with privacy shocks affect individuals’ likelihood to take precautionary behavior when faced with a new privacy shock in the context of credit markets. We focus on experiences with identity theft and data breaches, two kinds of privacy shocks that either directly...