I'm an Associate Professor of Finance at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, where my research sits at the intersection of household finance, behavioral economics, and financial institutions. I study how people make financial decisions across their lifetimes — why they save too little, trade too much, borrow in ways that hurt them, and systematically misread their own risks — and what those patterns mean for policy and market design.
A lot of my work starts with a simple question that turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer: why do people make the financial decisions they do? That curiosity has led me to study everything from how cash windfalls change household debt to how social networks amplify bad trading habits, from the long shadow that childhood exposure to banking casts on adult credit outcomes to how subjective beliefs about mortality quietly reshape retirement behavior.
Before joining ASU, I spent five years as an Assistant Professor at Boston College and four years as a Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — an experience that gave me a deep appreciation for the intersection of rigorous academic work and real-world policy impact. From 2022 to 2025, I served as Senior Advisor for Research and Policy at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where I worked to translate research findings into regulatory practice.
I've been fortunate to work with extraordinary co-authors and to see this research find audiences beyond academia — in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, NPR, and PBS NewsHour, among others. A few papers have been recognized with awards I'm especially proud of: the Dimensional Fund Advisors Distinguished Paper Award from the Journal of Finance, the RFS Rising Scholar Award, and the TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award finalist recognition — twice.
I currently serve as an Associate Editor at Management Science and the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. I received my Ph.D. in International Economics & Finance from Brandeis University and my B.A. in Economics from the University of Rochester.