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

该研究项目将研究消费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的项目的一部分，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。 这项研究将采用一种创新的数据连接方法，将个人信用数据和人口普查长期纵向数据结合起来。 研究人员还将采用创新的方法来研究信贷获取对家庭层面和宏观层面的若干结果产生影响的机制。 这个研究项目涉及一个非常重要的主题，因为信贷获得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穷、缩小教育差距、增加就业和生产力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。 这项拟议中的研究将使用一个组合的减少形式和结构估计策略，以确定家庭信贷的几个结果的因果关系的影响。第一个假设是，父母获得信贷可以提高孩子的大学入学率，减少孩子的债务。 识别策略是基于几个事件，产生信贷渠道的外生变化。 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）的创业成果。该项目还将利用2005年破产改革法案引入的各州破产收入上限的差异，作为信贷准入的工具之一。 刚好在截止线以上的父母（不能偿还债务的人）应该有更大的信贷渠道，而刚好在截止线以下的父母（可以申请破产的人）应该有更少的信贷渠道。 该研究还将估计一个结构模型，以从简化形式的估计中获得微观弹性估计，然后进行反事实分析，以衡量广泛的经济范围内的信贷准入对个人结果的影响。 该研究项目的结果将为美国和全球的减贫政策和贫困代际传递提供宝贵的投入。 该奖项反映了NSF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.