How Are Student Loans Associated with Life Satisfaction?

The AFS Conference will feature speakers, symposia, and several special sessions. Among them, we will introduce a new panel session for PhD students, highlighting how to best navigate the job market.
With the generous support of our sponsors, the Academy has awarded several best paper awards during past meetings and we anticipate continuing Best Paper awards in 2021.
We will continue with our Emerging Scholar Award to a current graduate student for promising research work on a paper or poster presented at the conference.

Keywords

Short Description

The theory of human capital (Becker, 1973) states that individuals will invest in an additional unit of human capital as long as the marginal benefit of that unit is greater than or equal to its marginal cost. Student loans provide opportunity for individual to enroll in higher education, which yields greater human capital, but with greater debt burden. Previous reserach shows that educational attainment, which can be achieved with student loans, is associated positively with life satisfaction (Kim and Chatterjee, 2019; Salinas-Jimenez, 2013). Therefore, the goal of this paper is to distinguish whether the positive association of education or the negative association of debt is the dominant effect on short term life satisfaction.

Lead & Corresponding Author

The Academy of Financial Services 35th Annual Meeting

September 21–22, 2021

Virtual