Jesse Bricker

Signaling Status: The Impact of Relative Income on Household Consumption and Financial Decisions

This paper investigates the importance of status in household consumption and financial decisions using household data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) linked to neighborhood data in the American Community Survey (ACS). We find evidence that a households income rank — its position in the income distribution relative to its close neighbors — is positively associated with its expenditures on high status cars, its level of indebtedness, as well as the riskiness of the households portfolio. More aggregate county-level evidence based on a dataset of every new car sold in each county in the United States since 2002 also suggests that the signaling motive might be important. These results indicate that greater income heterogeneity might have large consequences for household consumption and portfolio decisions.

The Impact of Early Commitment on Games Played: Evidence from College Football Recruiting

We use data on athletic scholarship acceptance decisions to show that high school football players signal their ability level by delaying commitment. Although colleges can obtain information about student athletes, National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations limit information flow, making private information an important component of the scholarship market. Using ordinary least squares, censored regression, and negative binomial estimation, we show that for a given observed ability level, committing to a scholarship offer early is associated with less playing time after acceptance. In one season and at a typical average early signing date, early-committing athletes played in 0.21 fewer games per season, or about 4% of the average number of games played.

Borrowing Constraints and Homeownership Over the Recent Cycle

This paper identifies for the first time the impact of borrowing constraints in the recent decline in homeownership rates. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), we measure the combined impact of income, wealth and credit constraints on homeownership outcomes over time. It has been established that credit supply loosened during the 2004-07 period and then became considerably more restricted in the wake of the Great Recession. Homeownership has also declined. However, the impact of this tightening of credit on probability of individual households to become homeowners has not previously been estimated. Using estimations of borrowing constraints going back to 2001, we identify the impact of earlier period borrowing constraints compared to those of 2010-13 on population level U.S. homeownership rates.

Survey Incentives, Survey Effort, and Survey Costs

This paper uses the 2007 and 2010 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to investigate how monetary incentives affect the time and effort that interviewers expend during the survey field period, and how these incentives affect effort expended by the survey respondent. The results imply that a larger monetary incentive offer helps reduce contact attempts and time in the field while maintaining data quality and effort during the survey by the respondent. Our results are based on a quasi-experiment that varies which families receive an incentive offer letter. Supporting evidence is given through a comparison of field effort outcomes between 2010 and 2007 after the base incentive increased from

Does Education Loan Debt Influence Household Financial Distress? An Assessment Using the 2007-09 SCF Panel

20 in 2007 to

A test for selection in matched administrative earnings data

50 in 2010.

Top Income Concentration and Volatility

This paper uses the recent 2007-09 SCF panel to examine the influence of student loans on financial distress. Families with student loans in 2007 have higher levels of financial distress than families without such loans, and these families were more susceptible to transitions to financial distress during the early stages of the Great Recession. This correlation persists once we control for a host of other demographic, work-status, and household balance sheet measures. Families with an average level of student loans were 3.1 percentage points more likely to be 60 days late paying bills and 3 percentage points more likely to be denied credit. During this same time period, families with other types of consumer debt were no more or less likely to be financially distressed. Education loans enable students to go to college and improve their employment and earnings prospects. On average, families with education loans in the 2007-09 SCF saw higher income growth between surveys. Further, the value of completing a degree is evident in the data: families without a degree but with education debt drive much of the correlations between financial distress and education loans.

Credit Scores, Social Capital, and Stock Market Participation

We test whether individuals in the Health and Retirement Study who consented to have administrative earnings data matched to survey responses represent a non-random sample. For both men and women, there is a general pattern of negative selection across three measures of pre-entry labor-market behavior: labor-force participation, self-employment, and earnings. However, for some outcomes the estimates are not precise enough to draw firm conclusions. The strongest results are that men who consented were 4.7 percentage points less likely to be self-employed than those who did not, and women who consented earned 13 percent less than those who did not.

Updates to the Sampling of Wealthy Families in the Survey of Consumer Finances

Measures of income concentration�?such as the share of income received by the highest income families�?may be biased by pro-cyclical volatility in annual income. Permanent income, though, can smooth away such volatility and sort families by their usual economic resources. Here, we demonstrate this bias using rolling 3-year panels of IRS tax records from 1997 to 2013 as a proxy for permanent income. For example, one measure of 2012 income concentration�?the share of income received by the top 0.1 percent�?falls from 11.3 percent to 8.9 percent when families are organized by permanent income instead of annual income. However, the growth in income concentration cannot be explained by this volatility, as growth rates are comparable in the permanent income and annual income groupings during our sample period. Further, the probability of remaining in the highest income groups, while relatively low at the very top of the distribution, increased slightly during our sample period, suggesting that top incomes have become less volatile in this dimension. These results are confirmed using household income data measured in the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)�?a household survey with a large oversample of high-income households and a unique measure of permanent income.

The Increase in Wealth Concentration, 1989-2013

While a rapidly growing body of research underscores the influence of social capital on financial decisions and economic developments, objective data-based measurements of social capital are lacking. We introduce average credit scores as an indicator of a communitys social capital and present evidence that this measure is consistent with, but richer and more robust than, those used in the existing literature, such as electoral participation, blood donations, and survey-based measures. Merging unique proprietary credit score data with two nationwide representative household surveys, we show that households residing in communities with higher social capital are more likely to invest in stocks, even after controlling for a rich set of socioeconomic, preferential, neighborhood, and demographic characteristics. Notably, such a relationship is robustly observed only when social capital is measured using community average credit scores. Consistent with the notion that social capital and trust promote stock investment, we find the following: first, the association between average credit score and stock ownership is more pronounced among the lower educated; second, social capital levels of the county where one grew up appear to have a lasting influence on future stock investment; and third, investors who did not own stocks before have a greater chance of entering the stock market a few years after they relocate to higher-score communities.