Coursework: ITP Seminar

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 2 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 3 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 4 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Amanda Gaulke
Department of Economics
Kansas State University

Dr. Chris Reynolds
Senior Financial Economist
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

"Student Loan Repayment Prioritization"

Student loan debt in the United States exceeds $1.6 trillion (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2019)). Various government programs have been implemented to try to reduce default, but they have had limited success. For example, income-based repayment plans; the United States General Accounting Office 2012 report stated that 70% of those who defaulted on their student loans would have qualified for an income-based repayment plan. Previous work has shown that options and framing matter for picking a repayment plan and for eventual student loan default (for example, Cox, Kreisman and Dynarksi (2018) and Abraham, Filiz-Ozbay, Ozbay and Turner (2018)). However, an alternative explanation as to why borrowers are defaulting on their student loans is that they prioritize repayment of other debts more. This paper contributes to the literature by documenting variation in student loan prioritization among student loan holders. If people are not paying because they are not prioritizing student loans—as opposed to because of severe economic shocks—switching repayment plans would not necessarily improve student loan repayment outcomes.  We use the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's Equifax Consumer Credit Panel dataset to document heterogeneity in debt prioritization among student loan holders. We find a substantial portion of consumers who only default on student loans, even as they continue to pay down other forms of debt. This group demonstrably prioritizes continued repayment of their student loans behind the repayment of other loan types. We examine the “payment hierarchy” of debt non-payment among those who default on multiple types of debt. This payment hierarchy is defined by ranking debt types by the order in which consumers default on them. Among borrowers with multiple types of debt entering default, we find that student loans are the most “protected” debt type—that is, on average, their student loans will default last among all loan types held.

Dr. Lesley Lavery
Political Science
Macalester College

Dr. Sara Dahill-Brown
Dept. of Politics and International Studies
Wake Forest University

"Collectively Confronting COVID-19: Teachers' Unions' Response to a Global Pandemic"

Drawing from a sample of union leaders working in more than 100 school districts, across 12 states, Sara Dahill-Brown and Lesley Lavery will discuss ongoing work to uncover teachers' unions' involvement with school plans for distance-learning, summer and fall re-opening, budget shortfalls and responses to greater acknowledgement of systemic racism.