I’m a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at The Ohio State University and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. My research focuses on stratification and inequality, economic sociology, and social policy. I’m particularly interested in credit, debt, risk, and economic insecurity, and how the state does or doesn’t intervene in the relationship between debtors and creditors. In my master’s thesis, I use a unique dataset to examine state differences in exemption laws, which determine the amount of property that a debtor can save from collections, and how the relative protectiveness of these laws relates to state-level economic insecurity from 1986-2012. I find that exemption law protections do matter, but only during recessionary periods, when a larger share of the population is experiencing financial trouble and more likely to be in collections. In other collaborative projects, colleagues and I examine topics including student loans, hardship, and risk over the recession, as well as government bond ratings and economic insecurity in states.