Many financially distressed students who qualify for federal assistance plans with interest moratorium and principal forgiveness instead accrue interest over long periods of nonpayment. This loan mismanagement is associated with higher delinquency. Mismanagement varies significantly across student gender and race: it is more prominent among male and non-white students. Mismanagement also varies across loan servicers, depending on proxies for student-adverse servicer policies. We consider explanations based on student selection and servicer treatment for loan mismanagement. Student financial literacy plays an important role but variation in treatment on the part of loan servicers appears more important.

Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) setting that leverages the staggered adoption of R&D tax credits across the U.S. states, we show that after a firm receives the tax credits, products of its peers become significantly more similar to the recipient firm. Such product convergence is particularly strong when peer firms face greater pressure from market participants to uphold short-term performances. We further show that the effect of R&D tax credits likely works through the increased technology spillovers, which motivate peers to imitate instead of differentiating. Accordingly, we show that peer firms shift their patent composition from breakthrough to incremental innovations following the R&D tax subsidy.