Among undergraduate freshmen, 529 college savings plans have become more prevalent than student loans, yet their educational impacts remain largely unexplored. This paper examines how wealth gains in 529 plans shape educational opportunities using variation in target-date fund designs within these plans. I find that 529 wealth gains substantially increase four-year college attendance, with the effect per $1,000 similar to that of targeted grant aid. These wealth gains also reduce student loan borrowing and boost private K-12 school enrollment. However, 529 wealth gains accrue disproportionately to upper-income households, exacerbating the four-year college attendance gaps across both socioeconomic and racial lines.

Selected for AFA 2027, SFS Cavalcade North America 2026, University of Colorado Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making 2026, SOLE 2026, MEA Annual Conference 2026, 51st Annual Conference of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, NBER Economics of Education Fall 2025, Canadian Economics Association 2024, EEA 2023, FMA 2023

This paper documents substantial asset `reclassification' in the U.S. mutual fund industry':' fund assets are moved into twin separate accounts and collective trusts that follow the same strategy and share the same portfolio team. In 2021, transfers between mutual funds and their twin vehicles exceeded $550 billion. These reclassifications involve no investor flows, yet they distort measured fund flows, creating a non-classical measurement error that biases coefficient estimates in flow-based regressions. Adjusting for reclassification changes estimates of central relationships in the mutual fund literature':' for example, it raises the flow-performance sensitivity of funds with twins by more than one third.

Selected for WFA 2026, SFS Cavalcade North America 2026, FIRS 2026, 2026 FIRN Asset Management Meeting, 13th Annual Conference on Financial Market Regulation, NFA 2025

We examine long-term trends in faculty compensation and its underlying drivers in North America, using a comprehensive administrative dataset covering most research institutions. We document three primary facts. First, wage dispersion across academic fields has widened significantly over the past 50 years, with economics, business, and especially finance exhibiting a large and growing premium. Second, faculty wages are strongly and positively correlated with their students' post-graduation earnings across fields. Third, the relative supply of PhD students varies also substantially across fields, with high paying fields training relatively fewer PhD students. Using granular data on student earnings at the university-field-year level, we estimate the elasticity of faculty pay with respect to students' post-graduation earnings to be around 0.7. This elasticity varies significantly across fields and has increased over time. Our results align with a model of occupational choice, where higher industry wages simultaneously increase demand for faculty, through greater student enrollment and university revenues, and raise the opportunity cost of doctoral training in corresponding fields. Field-specific frictions further shape how this labor market tightening translates into faculty wages. Overall, our findings illustrate how academic wages are increasingly shaped by broader labor market dynamics, with field-specific responsiveness amplifying the transmission of private-sector wage differentials into growing faculty pay dispersion.

Selected for SOLE 2025, AFA 2024, EFA 2022, the 2022 Paris December Finance Meeting, 2022 FSU SunTrust Beach Conference

This paper studies how menu design affects household participation and contributions in 529 college savings plans. We exploit two types of state-level staggered variation in plan menu design':' the inclusion of investment options tailored to different risk tolerance levels and the addition of an alternative menu through the creation of an additional in-state 529 plan. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that implemented menu design changes have diverse effects on household investments in 529 college savings plans. We find that both the inclusion of risk-based target date options and the addition of the alternative menu increase in-state participation and contributions to college savings plans. Expanding the menu to include static asset allocation options raises household contributions but not participation, while having a positive spillover effect on flows to other investment options. Our results suggest that modifying the menu design of 529 college savings plans can enhance investment in human capital.

Selected for MFA 2024, FMA 2024

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 investments. Employing the implementation of a financial aid program that eliminated college saving motives for some military households, I demonstrate that it reduced the probability of stock market participation outside of retirement accounts for these households by more than a quarter. I provide additional evidence that college savings motives explain a significant share of stock market participation by demonstrating that only one form of college savings, education savings accounts, accounts for 21% of stock market participation outside of retirement accounts for households with children.

Selected for AEA 2022, NFA 2021, Trans-Atlantic Doctoral Conference 2021