Meta Brown
Research Fellow
Meta Brown is a research fellow of the Institute for Economic Equity. She is an associate professor of economics at The Ohio State University and a faculty affiliate of its Institute for Population Research. Her research has examined the space between lender and borrower reports of consumer obligations, the influence of financial and quantitative education on young consumers’ debt experiences, the debt portfolio maneuvers of more and less sophisticated consumers, and the “graying” of American debt.
Ongoing work relates younger Americans’ homeownership and intergenerational co-residence choices to the college costs that prevailed for their cohorts in their states. Her work has appeared in the Review of Economic Studies and the Review of Financial Studies, it has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and it has been covered by The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Professor Brown was previously a senior economist with the Research group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a member of the economics department faculties of Stony Brook University and the University of Wisconsin. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.
- Echoes of rising tuition in students’ borrowing, educational attainment, and homeownership in post-recession America
with Zachary Bleemer, Donghoon Lee, Katherine Strair, and Wilbert van der Klaauw, Journal of Urban Economics, 2021 - The Graying of American Debt
with Zachary Bleemer, Donghoon Lee, and Wilbert van der Klaauw In O.S. Mitchell and A. Lusardi (eds.), Remaking Retirement: Debt in an Aging Economy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020 - Understanding the Evolution of Student Loan Balances and Repayment Behavior: Do Institution Type and Degree Matter?
with Rajashri Chakrabarti, Wilbert van der Klaauw and Basit Zafar, Economic Policy Review, 25(1), December 2019 - Financial Education and the Debt Behavior of the Young
with John Grigsby, Wilbert van der Klaauw, Jaya Wen, and Basit Zafar, Review of Financial Studies, 29(9): 2490-2522, September 2016 - Do Informal Referrals Lead to Better Matches? Evidence from a Firm’s Employee Referral System
with Elizabeth Setren and Giorgio Topa, Journal of Labor Economics, 34(1): 161-209, January 2016 - Do We Know What We Owe? A Comparison of Borrower- and Lender-Reported Consumer Debt
with Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee and Wilbert van der Klaauw, Economic Policy Review, 21(1): 19-44, October 2015 - How Much Student Debt is Out There?
with Jesse Bricker, Simona Hannon, and Karen Pence, FEDS Notes 2015-08-07, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, 2015 - The Impact of Housing Markets on Consumer Debt: Credit Report Evidence from 1999 to 2012
with Sarah Stein and Basit Zafar, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, 47(S1): 175-213, March/April 2015 - Measuring Student Debt and its Performance (PDF)
with Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw, in Student Loans and the Dynamics of Debt, Brad Hershbein and Kevin M. Hollenbeck, eds. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, pp. 37-52, 2015 - Student Debt Growth and the Repayment Progress of Recent Cohorts (PDF)
with Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw, The American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, 23(1): 331-346, Winter 2015 - The Financial Crisis at the Kitchen Table: Recent Trends in Household Debt and Credit
with Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee and Wilbert van der Klaauw, Current Issues in Economics and Finance, 19(2): 1-10, 2013 - Young Student Loan Borrowers Retreat from Housing and Auto Markets
with Sydnee Caldwell, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics Blog, April 17, 2013 - A New Test of Borrowing Constraints for Education
with John Karl Scholz and Ananth Seshadri, Review of Economic Studies, 79(2): 511-538, April 2012 - Real-Time Search in the Laboratory and the Market
with Christopher J. Flinn and Andrew Schotter, American Economic Review, 101(2), April 2011
