Speakers

Keynote Speaker

Raphael Bostic

Dr. Raphael W. Bostic took office June 5, 2017, as the 15th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is responsible for all the Bank's activities, including monetary policy, bank supervision and regulation, and payment services. In addition, he serves on the Federal Reserve's chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta serves the Sixth Federal Reserve District, which covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, and parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The Bank has branches in Birmingham, Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, and New Orleans.

Presenters

Bronson Argyle

Bronson Argyle is an Assistant Professor in Finance at the Marriott School of Business of Brigham Young University. His research in household and behavioral finance focuses on consumer credit markets, examining how households think about debt for durable goods and how financing shocks and frictions propagate through the real economy. Bronson received a B.S. in physics from BYU in 2008 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2014.

Asaf Bernstein

Asaf Bernstein is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Leeds School of Business and a Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research. His interests generally lie at the intersection of policy and finance and include household finance, real estate corporate finance, economic history, and asset pricing. His research has looked at the effect of financial regulations and institutions, including the Federal Reserve, rating agencies, centralized clearing, mortgage assistance, and mortgage regulatory programs. This work has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Finance, and Journal of Financial Economics and received numerous awards, including the 2019 AQR Insight Distinguished Paper Award. Prior to joining Leeds, he completed his PhD in Financial Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based on his graduate work he received the 2016 AQR Top Finance Graduate Award by Copenhagen Business School, which recognizes the six most promising finance PhD graduates in the world.

Simon Blanchard

Simon Blanchard is the Beyer Family Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgetown University, where he is the director of the MBA Certificate in Consumer Analytics & Insights. In his research, he develops statistical methods and tools to help managers understand how consumers make complex decisions. Substantively, he focuses on how financially vulnerable consumers prioritize debts and make financial decisions. Blanchard's research and opinions on personal finance issues have been featured in outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, Lifehacker, CNBC, and Motley Fool. He also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and as a member of the American Marketing Association Academic Council.

Eirik Eylands Brandsaas

Eirik Eylands Brandsaas is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in economics and finance and is joining the Federal Reserve Board after graduating this spring. He is a macroeconomist with research interests in household finance, homeownership, and family economics. In particular, his research focuses on how frictions in housing markets affect portfolio choices and how family resources affect housing market frictions.

Sasha Indarte

Sasha Indarte is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research uses big data and quasi-experimental research designs to investigate the causes and consequences of financial distress and how policy can alleviate distress. She received her PhD in Economics from Northwestern University.

Lauren Lambie-Hanson

Lauren Lambie-Hanson is an advisor and research fellow in the Consumer Finance Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Her primary research interests include residential mortgage lending, housing affordability, and the maintenance and improvement decisions of property owners. Before joining the Consumer Finance Institute, she was a principal financial economist in the Philadelphia Fed’s Supervision, Regulation, and Credit Department. Lauren holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She serves on the board of directors of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and is a member of the Urban Institute Housing Finance Policy Center’s Academic Research Council.

Kuan Liu

Kuan Liu is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Walton College of Business of University of Arkansas. He joined Walton in Fall 2020 after completion of his Ph.D. in Finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current research focuses on the impact of regulations on U.S. financial institutions.

Erik Mayer

Erik Mayer is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. His research interests include financial institutions, household finance, and empirical corporate finance. His recent work studies racial disparities in households’ access to credit, and the role of credit access in intergenerational economic mobility. Mayer received his doctorate in finance from Rice University in 2018, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematical economic analysis from Rice in 2012.

Paolina Medina

Paolina C. Medina is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University. She conducts research on Household Finance using field experiments and observational data, with a focus on understanding how psychological biases affect financial decisions. She received her PhD in Managerial Economics from Northwestern University in June 2017, and her BA in Economics from ITAM in 2009. In between, she worked at Mexican Central Bank for three years, with the retail financial services group.

Donald Morgan

Don Morgan is an Economist and Assistant Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His research on banks and credit markets have been published in top economics journals including the American Economics Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is an associate editor at the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking and a founding editor of Liberty Street Economics, the NY Fed's Research Department blog. He has taught at Columbia University and NYU, was visiting scholar at the Stockholm Institute of Financial Research, and is a Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. Mr. Morgan earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin.

Scott Nelson

Scott Nelson’s research focuses on consumer credit markets, in particular how regulation interacts with information asymmetries and market structure, and how consumers make choices about borrowing, deleveraging, and default. His research uses a range of data sources including credit reports, credit card account data, surveys, court filings, and employment data together with models of consumer and firm behavior to understand the drivers of credit market outcomes. His research on the US credit card market was awarded the AQR Top Finance Graduate Award in 2018. Prior to joining Booth, Nelson spent a post-doctoral year with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Princeton University; he has also been a research fellow with the City of Boston Office of Financial Empowerment, a visiting graduate fellow with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. Nelson earned a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before his studies at MIT, Nelson worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and at Innovations for Poverty Action, where he was a member of the US Household Finance Initiative. He received a BA (summa cum laude) in economics and mathematics from Yale College.

Michaela Pagel

Michaela Pagel is an Associate Professor (without tenure) at Columbia Business School. She received her Ph.D. from the Economics Department at UC Berkeley and works on topics in household finance, behavioral economics, and macroeconomics. Her dissertation focused on the consumption and investment implications of non-standard preferences. More specifically, she theoretically studied how decision-making is affected by people's beliefs about their consumption. Her current work analyzes transaction-level data on income, spending, balances, credit limits, and logins stemming from financial aggregation apps. Furthermore, she is working with bank account data on income and spending linked to individual investors' security trades and portfolios. She uses this data to study the relationship between spending and income as well as the determinants of credit card borrowing. She is also interested in stock market participation and the interactions between spending and individual investor biases.

Carlos Parra

Carlos Parra has a Ph.D. in finance from McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and is working as an Assistant Professor of Finance at PUC Chile. His primary research interests are in household finance, financial intermediation, and empirical corporate finance.

Nathaniel Pattison

Nathaniel Pattison is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Southern Methodist University. His research is in applied microeconomics with a focus on consumer credit market regulations and their interaction with labor markets and social insurance programs. He is especially interested in how bankruptcy and informal default help individuals cope with negative shocks such as unemployment or illness.

Matthew Plosser

Matthew Plosser is a Research Officer in the Financial Intermediation Function at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His research covers a wide-array of topics on bank and nonbank lending, household borrowing, private equity, and financial supervision. In addition to his research efforts, Matt oversees the Pre-Provision Net Revenue model used in Federal Reserve stress tests. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business in 2012.

Denis Sosyura

Denis Sosyura is Professor of Finance at Arizona State University (ASU). Before joining ASU in 2017, he served on the faculty of the University of Michigan for nine years after completing his PhD at Yale University. His primary research focus is on corporate finance, financial institutions, and financial media. His work has been published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He has received eight best paper awards from leading academic conferences, and he also holds the Distinguished Referee Award from the Review of Financial Studies. His teaching has also been recognized by a number of awards, such as the Most Impactful Finance Professor and the John W. Teets Outstanding Teaching Award, as well as numerous award nominations, including the Economist Intelligence Unit Business Professor of the Year Award, ASU Centennial Professorship Award, Provost Prize for Teaching Innovation, Golden Apple Teaching Award, and the MBA Teaching Excellence Award.

David Zhang

David Zhang is a 5th year PhD student at Harvard Business School. His research fields are Finance, Real Estate, and Industrial Organization. He is broadly interested in questions surrounding racial equity, distribution, and social welfare in financial markets.

Chen Zhao

Chen Zhao is a research lead with the financial markets and housing finance team at the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Prior to joining JPMCI in 2016, Chen was an economics consultant at Analysis Group, Inc., where she worked on financial litigation cases and led teams conducting health economics and outcomes research on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. While in graduate school, Chen was with the Center for Economic Studies and the Social Economic and Housing Statistics Division at the US Census Bureau, where she conducted applied microeconomics research using large scale restricted-access linked survey-administrative data. She started her career at the Council of Economic Advisers, where she focused on labor and health economics. Chen holds a B.S. in economics and brain & cognitive sciences from MIT and a Ph.D in economics from Cornell University with fields in labor economics, health economics, and applied econometrics.