Overview
Jialan Wang is an economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Department of Finance). Her research focuses on consumer finance, household financial distress, and bankruptcy. She is co-developer (with Tal Gross and Matthew Notowidigdo) of the near-census public bankruptcy records dataset compiled from PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), covering 81 of 94 US bankruptcy courts between 1994 and 2006, which has become a foundational data infrastructure for empirical work on household financial distress, health insurance, and disability program effects.
Key Contributions
- Co-constructed the Gross, Notowidigdo, and Wang (2014) near-census PACER bankruptcy dataset — the primary bankruptcy data source used in Deshpande, Gross, and Su (2021), Gross and Notowidigdo (2011), and Deshpande, Gross, and Wang (2017)
- Co-author of Deshpande, Gross, and Wang (2017): first causal estimates of government cash assistance effects on household financial outcomes; SSI removal reduces parent bankruptcy filing probability by 12 pp (80% decline), interpreted as a credit access mechanism — SSI income generates creditworthiness, so losing SSI means losing credit and therefore the capacity to incur bankruptcy
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