Publications

Using data from over 75,000 professors across fields and U.S. universities, we quantify a 50% wage premium for Finance research faculty. We document a positive correlation between students' future earnings and faculty pay across fields. In addition, within fields, faculty wage elasticity to students' lifetime earnings is three times higher in Finance than in other fields. Evidence suggests that higher student earnings lead to increased university revenues. Competition for talent and fairness considerations may explain why Finance professors obtain a fraction of these additional revenues, hence accounting for a pronounced wage spill-over from the industry to academia in Finance.

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.

This paper studies how menu design affects household participation and contributions in 529 college savings programs. Our empirical setting exploits two types of state-level staggered variation in program 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 529 plan. We find that the inclusion of risk-based target-date options and the creation of an additional 529 plan both enhance participation and contributions in in-state college savings programs. The inclusion of static asset allocation options has no effect on participation but raises household contributions. Our results suggest that modifying the menu design of 529 college savings programs can increase investments in human capital.