Educational Debt Burden and Career Choice: Evidence from a Financial Aid Experiment at NYU Law School
Abstract
This paper examines the influence of psychological responses to debt on career choices from an experiment in which alternative financial aid packages were assigned by lottery to a set of law school admits. The packages had equivalent monetary value, but one required the student to take on a loan that would be paid for by the school if he worked in public interest law, while the other covered tuition as long as the student worked in public interest law. If he did not, the student would be required to reimburse the school. Tuition assistance recipients have a 36 to 45 percent higher public interest placement rate and, when lottery results were announced before enrollment, were twice as likely to enroll. (JEL I21, I22, J44, D14)
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Law school graduates are more likely to pursue public interest careers when offered conditional grants that convert to loans if they opt out of public service, than when offered loans that convert to grants if service obligations are fulfilled.
“law school graduates were more likely to pursue public interest careers when offered conditional grants that would convert to loans if graduates opted out of public service, than when offered loans that would convert to grants if their service obligations were fulfilled (even though the two options are financially equivalent).”
From College Costs, Financial Aid, and Student Decisions (2022) · cites this paper as Field (2009)
Cites
Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979) · Econometrica · doi:10.2307/1914185 · Cited by 48,524 · see citing works
Status quo bias in decision making
Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988) · Journal of Risk and Uncertainty · doi:10.1007/bf00055564 · Cited by 5,897 · see citing works
Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1991) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.5.1.193 · Cited by 5,019 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Constrained after college: Student loans and early-career occupational choices
Rothstein, J., & Rouse, C. E. (2011) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.09.015 · Cited by 506 · see citing works
Financial aid policy: lessons from research
Dynarski, S., & Scott-Clayton, J. (2013) · The Future of children · doi:10.1353/foc.2013.0002 · Cited by 255 · see citing works
Student Loans and Homeownership
Mezza, A., Ringo, D., Sherlund, S., & Sommer, K. (2020) · Journal of Labor Economics · doi:10.1086/704609 · Cited by 110 · see citing works
Marx, B. M., & Turner, L. J. (2018) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · doi:10.1257/app.20160127 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
College Costs, Financial Aid, and Student Decisions
Dynarski, S., Page, L., & Scott-Clayton, J. (2022) · National Bureau of Economic Research · doi:10.3386/w30275 · Cited by 56 · see citing works
Designed to fail: Effects of the default option and information complexity on student loan repayment
Cox, J. C., Kreisman, D., & Dynarski, S. (2020) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104298 · Cited by 49 · see citing works
- Authors
- Field, E.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Field, Erica
- Venue
- American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2009-01-01
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-21
- ISSN
- 1945-7782 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-7790
- OpenAlex
- W2148970308
- Cited by
- 268
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 19 · 2017: 21 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 26 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 42.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Economic Journal Applied Economics (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education Research Studies
- Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- student debt, career choice, public interest law, tuition assistance, debt repayment, lottery assignment, law school enrollment
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
