Young Americans are heavily reliant on debt and have clear financial literacy shortcomings. In this paper, we study the effects of exposure to financial training on debt outcomes in early adulthood among a large and representative sample of young Americans. Variation in exposure to financial training comes from statewide changes in high school graduation requirements. Using a flexible event study approach, we find that both mathematics and financial education, by and large, decrease reliance on nonstudent debt and improve repayment behavior. Economics training, on the other hand, increases both the likelihood of holding outstanding debt and the prevalence of repayment difficulties.

Using a new firm-level data set that includes explicit information on referrals by current employees, we investigate the hiring process and the relationships among referrals, match quality, wage trajectories, and turnover for a single US corporation and test various predictions of theoretical models of labor market referrals. We find that referred candidates are more likely to be hired; experience an initial wage advantage, which dissipates over time; and have longer tenure in the firm. Further, the variances of the referred and nonreferred wage distributions converge over time. The observed referral effects appear to be stronger at lower skill levels. The data also permit analysis of the role of referrer-referee pair characteristics.

To assess the child welfare impact of policies governing divorced parenting, such as child support orders, child custody assignments, and marital dissolution standards, one must consider their influence not only on the divorce rate but also on spouses’ fertility choices and child investments. We develop a model of fertility, parenting, and divorce, from which we derive estimates of parental preferences and a child cognitive ability production function, using data on parental time allocation, children’s cognitive attainment, and realized fertility and divorce. Family policies that reduce divorce are simulated to have significant negative impacts on both fertility and child development.

More than three-quarters of U.S. households bear consumer debt, yet we have little understanding of the relationship between financial education and the debt behavior of U.S. consumers. In this paper, we study the effects of exposure to financial training on debt outcomes in early adulthood. Identification comes from variation in financial literacy, economics, and mathematics course offerings and graduation requirements mandated over the 1990s and 2000s by state-level high-school curricula. The FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel provides debt outcomes based on quarterly Equifax credit reports from 1999 to 2012. Our analysis, based on a flexible event-study approach, reveals significant effects of financial education on debt-related outcomes of youth. On the extensive margin, financial literacy education has a sizable impact on the propensity of youth having a credit report. Conditional on having a credit report, on the intensive margin, math and financial literacy education exposure reduces the incidence of adverse outcomes - such as accounts in collections and delinquent accounts - and reduces both the likelihood of youth carrying debt and their average debt balances. The net effect of both math and financial literacy education is an increase in youths' average creditworthiness, as measured by the Equifax risk score. On the other hand, economic education increases the likelihood of individuals carrying balances, leads to significant increases in debt balances - in particular, debt used to support consumption - and, at the same time, increases the likelihood of adverse credit outcomes, leading to a decline in youths' average risk scores. The effects of these financial education policies accumulate over the course of early adulthood. Our results suggest that financial education programs, increasingly promoted by policymakers, are likely to have significant impacts on the financial decision-making of youth, but the effects depend on the content of these programs.

While widely accepted labor market search models imply a constant reservation wage policy, empirical evidence strongly suggests that reservation wages decline in search duration. This paper reports the results of the first real-time-search laboratory experiment. The controlled environment subjects face is stationary, and the payoff-maximizing reservation wage is constant. Nevertheless, subjects' reservation wages decline sharply over time. We investigate two hypotheses to explain this decline: 1. Searchers respond to the stock of accruing search costs. 2. Searchers experience non-stationary subjective costs of time spent searching. Our data support the latter hypothesis, and we substantiate this conclusion both experimentally and econometrically. (JEL C91, D83, J64)