Erica Ryan

I am currently a 4th year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to this, I did my undergraduate degrees in Studio art and Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. During my undergraduate experience I worked as an RA under Dr. Peter Murrell and Sai Luo, and had internships at the FDIC and NASA Goddard. After I graduated from UMD in 2018, I worked at Fannie Mae as a Quantitative Modeler in their Model Risk Management group.

While at Fannie Mae, I reviewed models across the single-family mortgage business including cash flow models and behavioral models for predicting mortgage outcomes, models related to HECM reverse mortgages, random post-acquisition review processes, and other single-family models. I also studied trends in macroeconomic indicators leading up to and during recessions to better understand how stress scenarios impact borrower behavior, culminating in a presentation to the Model Risk Oversight Committee. At the end of my time at Fannie Mae, I also had the opportunity to begin reviewing models related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the mortgage industry. My experience at Fannie Mae has guided my current research interests which include housing and the connections between household-level decision making and the broader macro housing landscape, urban development, financial literacy, and household finances.

Since starting my Ph.D. I've had the opportunity to work as a Research Assistant (RA) for Dr. Melissa Kearney and as an Economist for Ispo Facto Solutions. In my role as an RA, I have worked on several projects including updating the analysis for prior papers with more recent data, and exploring recent and historical trends in birth rates, social programs, and marital trends across the U.S., Canda, and the U.K. to support a grant proposal and several opinion pieces/policy pieces. As an Economist for Ipso Facto Solutions, I have validated two mortgage pricing/valuation models, re-estimated a loss allowance adjustment model, and helped to write a paper on mortgage forbearance.

For my Ph.D. I am currently working on projects related to the migration effects of place-based policies, the distributional effects of differential tuition, and the effects of upzoning on migration and school outcomes. I have also worked on a couple of personal proejcts, including a mentorship matching project and a probabalistic approach to playing a spatial guessing game called Disco (available to view on the Research tab). In what little free time I have, I also work on a variety of art projects exploring ideas of comfort/discomfort, equilibrium, and balance (available to view on the Art tab).