Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 14th May 2024, 05:31:49am EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
Track M2-3: Household Debt
Time:
Monday, 20/May/2024:
10:30am - 11:15am

Session Chair: Constantine Yannelis, University of Chicago
Discussant: Menaka Hampole, Yale SOM
Location: Room 1212


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Presentations

Borrow Now, Pay Even Later: A Quantitative Analysis of Student Debt Payment Plans

Nuno Clara1, Michael Boutros2, Francisco Gomes3

1Duke University; 2Bank of Canada; 3London Business School

In the United States, student debt currently represents the second largest component of consumer debt, just after mortgage loans. Repayment of those loans reduces disposable income early in the borrower's lifecycle, when marginal utility is particularly high, and limits their ability to build a buffer stock of wealth to insure against background risks. In this paper, we study alternative student debt contracts that offer a 10-year deferral period. Borrowers defer either principal payments only ("Principal Payment Deferral", PPD) or all payments ("Full Payment Deferral", FPD) with the missed interest payments added to the value of the debt outstanding. We first calibrate an equilibrium with the current contracts, and then solve for counterfactual equilibria with the PPD or FPD contracts. We find that both alternatives generate economically large welfare gains, which are robust to different assumptions about the behavior of the lenders and borrower preferences. We decompose the gains into the percentages resulting from loan repricing and from the deferral of debt repayments. We compare these alternative contracts with the changes to Income Driven Repayment Plans being proposed by the current U.S. administration and show that they dominate such proposals. Crucially, the PPD and FPD contracts deliver similar welfare gains to the debt relief program considered by the administration, with no impact on the government budget constraint.


Clara-Borrow Now, Pay Even Later-1240.pdf


 
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