Trevor Bakker

Trevor Bakker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His research interests include labor economics and public economics. He has been a graduate fellow of the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford, a predoctoral fellow of the Equality of Opportunity Project (now Opportunity Insights) at Harvard University and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a research assistant at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He holds an MSc in Economics from University College London (UCL), where he was a Fulbright Postgraduate, and an AB in Social Studies from Harvard College.

 

His current research uses nationwide US administrative data to measure the impact of home foreclosure on children. Does foreclosure transmit disadvantage across generations? By developing a measure of lender aggressiveness toward borrowers who fall behind on their mortgage payments and analyzing the quasi-experimental variation in completed foreclosure that it creates, the project identifies causal effects of foreclosure on children’s economic opportunity. Understanding these effects can inform the work of practitioners in civil society and government on consumer lending, education, and housing.