The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Earnings Mobility, Entrepreneurship and Income Inequality

这个研究项目将研究消费者信贷对许多家庭结果的影响，包括就业、学生债务、收入和新企业的形成。这项研究是一个更大项目的一部分，该项目调查了消费信贷对几个结果的影响，包括经济增长、消费和投资、收入分配、财富和收入的代际传递以及创新。这项研究将基于一种创新的数据链接方法，将个人信用数据和人口普查长期纵向数据相结合。研究人员还将使用一种创新的方法来研究信贷获取对家庭层面和宏观层面的几种结果产生影响的机制。这个研究项目涉及一个非常重要的课题，因为信贷获取已经成为美国和世界各地消除贫困的一个非常重要的问题。这项研究的结果将为减少贫困、缩小教育差距、增加就业和生产率以及总体经济增长的政策提供投入。因此，这项研究将对美国的经济增长产生重要影响。本研究将使用简化形式和结构估计策略的组合来确定家庭信贷获取对几个结果的因果影响。第一个假设是，父母的信贷渠道提高了孩子的大学出勤率，减少了孩子的债务。识别策略基于几个事件，这些事件会产生信贷获取的外生变化。然后，这种信贷获取的外生变化被用来研究随后的学生债务、劳动力市场结果和孩子（和父母）的创业结果。该项目还将利用各州破产收入下限的差异，这是2005年破产改革法案引入的，是获得信贷的工具之一。略高于临界值（不能偿还债务）的父母应该有更多的信贷渠道，而略低于临界值（可以申请破产）的父母应该有较少的信贷渠道。研究还将估计一个结构模型，从简化形式估计中获得微观弹性估计，然后进行反事实计算，以衡量广泛的经济范围内的信贷获取对个人结果的影响。该研究项目的结果将为美国和全球减少贫困和贫困代际传递的政策提供宝贵的投入。这将有助于确立美国在减少贫困方面的全球领导者地位。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This research project will study the effects consumer credit access on many family outcomes, including employment, student debt, income, and new business formation. The research is part of a larger project that investigates the effects of consumer credit access on several outcomes, including economic growth, consumption and investment, income distribution, intergenerational transmission of wealth and income, and innovation. The study will be based on an innovative data linkage method that combines personal credit data and Census longitudinal data over longer periods of time. The researchers will also use an innovative approach to study the mechanisms through which credit access affect several outcomes at the family level as well as the macro level. This research project deals with a very important subject as credit access has become a very important issue for poverty eradication in the US and the around the world. The results of this research will provide inputs into policies to reduce poverty, close the education gap, increase employment and productivity and economic growth generally. This study will therefore have important effect on economic growth in the US. This proposed research will use a mix of reduced form and structural estimation strategies to identify the causal impact of family credit access on several outcomes. The first hypothesis is that parental credit access improves child college attendance rates and decreases the amount of debt incurred by the child. The identification strategy is based on several events that generate exogenous variation in credit access. This exogenous variation in credit access is then used to look at subsequent student debt, labor market outcomes, and entrepreneurial outcomes of the children (and parents). The project will also use variation across states income cutoffs for bankruptcies, introduced by the 2005 bankruptcy-reform act as one of the instruments for credit access. Parents just above the cutoff (who cannot discharge debts) should have greater credit access, whereas parents just below the cutoff (who can file for bankruptcy) should have lesser credit access. The research will also estimate a structural model to obtain micro-elasticity estimates from the reduced form estimates and then conduct counterfactuals to measure the impact of broad economy-wide credit access on individual outcomes. The results of this research project will provide valuable inputs into policies to reduce poverty and the inter-generational transmission of poverty in the US and globally. This will help establish the US as the global leader in poverty reduction.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.