529 college savings plans have become more prevalent than student loans among undergraduates, 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 NBER Economics of Education Fall 2025, AEA 2022, EEA 2023, NFA 2021, FMA 2023, Trans-Atlantic Doctoral Conference 2021

This paper documents substantial asset ‘reclassification’ in the mutual fund industry, exceeding $450 billion in 2021. These reclassification events do not involve investor flows; instead, mutual fund assets are simply converted into twin investment vehicles, such as separate accounts or collective investment trusts. Analyzing the implications of asset reclassification for the mutual fund literature, we find that these events distort inferred mutual fund flows without reflecting actual asset movements at the investment product level. Failing to account for asset reclassification in flow-based regression analyses can lead to biased estimates, as it resembles a non-classical measurement error. We first analyze scenarios in which mutual fund flows serve as a dependent variable, focusing on flow-performance sensitivity. A regression utilizing reclassification-adjusted quarterly flows demonstrates a 40-100% greater flow-performance sensitivity for mutual funds with twin vehicles than one employing unadjusted flows. We then examine cases when flows serve as an independent variable, as in ‘smart money’ tests, where measurement error artificially inflates true estimates.

Selected for NFA 2025

We study long-term trends in the compensation of faculty and its drivers in the U.S. and Canada, using a panel dataset covering most research institutions. We document three stylized facts across academic disciplines. First, the dispersion of faculty pay has widened significantly over the past 50 years, with economics, business, and especially finance exhibiting a large and growing premium. Second, faculty wages correlate strongly with their student returns to college education, both in levels and in the time-series. Third, high paying fields display higher students per faculty ratios and a lower supply of PhD students relative to faculty. Using granular data on students' future earnings at the university-field level, we estimate the elasticity of faculty pay to returns to college education to be in the [0.4-0.7] range. However, this elasticity varies significantly across disciplines':' it is higher in fields with larger student-to-faculty ratios and lower PhD supply. This heterogeneity in elasticity explains, for example, the sizable wage premium of finance over computer science faculty, despite similar student future earnings in both fields. Our findings suggest that faculty wages are increasingly shaped by inter-university competition within fields, driven by student demand responding to varying returns to university education across disciplines. In contrast, industry outside options for faculty appear to play only a limited role.

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

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

This paper investigates the distribution of benefits from lower-cost institutional investment vehicles, such as collective investment trusts and separate accounts. While these vehicles can offer substantial fee advantages over mutual funds, we find that benefit realization depends on access structure. Direct access delivers significant cost savings to investors, whereas feeder fund structures often allow intermediaries to capture these benefits while charging investors traditional mutual fund fees.

This paper documents that target-date funds frequently deviate from their stated target allocations, with deviations correlating within fund families and persisting over time. These deviations are more pronounced in years without disclosed target allocation information and negatively correlate with previous-year flows.