Grace Beals (2025)

Grace Beals is a PhD Candidate in American Politics at Cornell University’s Department of Government. She earned her Master of Arts in Analytical Political Economy in 2020 from Duke University and her Bachelor of Arts in Economics in 2018 from Michigan State University. She studies inequality, public policy, and political economy in the United States, with a particular focus on private credit markets. Her recent work analyzes how and why people turn to private credit when the labor market or welfare state changes and discusses the inequality-enhancing effects of those choices.

Her dissertation,Taking Credit: How Debt and its Regulation Structure the American Political Economy, is advised by Jamila Michener (chair), Mallory SoRelle, Isabel M. Perera, and Gustavo Flores-Macías. The project, which she plans to develop into a book, asks how Americans make ends meet when they do not have enough support from either the labor market or the welfare state. She argues that Americans have become increasingly reliant on private credit but that this reliance is unequally distributed across the population, with negative outcomes disproportionately concentrated on the most vulnerable populations. Her dissertation builds on the credit-welfare state tradeoff literature by integrating alternative, not just traditional, credit products into the analysis. This includes payday loans, recurring credit card use, and online options like buy-now-pay-later loans. In addition, she builds on existing research by incorporating micro-level labor market fluctuations into the analysis.

The dissertation uses mixed methods ranging from archival research to uncover the motivations of consumer advocacy groups to (de)regulate credit products, causal inference methods to analyze the effects of regulations on consumers’ economic outcomes, and original data collection spanning more than twenty years of state-level payday loan regulation.