Meta Brown

Meta Brown is a professor of economics at Ohio State, a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Population Research, an affiliate of the Center for Aging Families and a courtesy pofessor of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. She is a labor and household finance economist whose research has examined the effects of financial education on young adults’ borrowing and repayment of debt, the contributions of parents and children to children’s higher education, parents’ distinct investments in minor children through divorce, the effects of both unemployment insurance generosity and bankruptcy protection generosity on U.S. households’ financial stability, and the role of family support after job loss. Brown’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and has been published in the Review of Economic Studies, Review of Financial Studies, American Economic Review, Nature Human Behavior, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and Ohio State’s own Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.

Recently, Brown has collaborated with Ohio State and Wisconsin faculty in developing a large administrative data resource on the finances, education and working lives of millions of adult Ohioans, and she has received NSF support for research on Ohioans’ enrollment, borrowing and success in STEM education and careers.

Before joining Ohio State, Brown was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an economics department faculty member at Stony Brook University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She holds a PhD in economics from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from The Ohio State University.