Kyle Herkenhoff is assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He received grants in the past while an employee at the University of Minnesota. His latest research, which is coauthored with Gordon Phillips and Ethan Cohen-Cole, combines new sorting theory and newly merged administrative credit records and employment histories to measure the impact of credit on the outcomes of displaced workers and the broader macroeconomy. Follow-up work, also joint with Gordon Phillips and Ethan Cohen-Cole, combines entrepreneur tax records with credit reports to explore the role of consumer credit for startups, entrepreneurship, and job flows.

Herkenhoff has co-authored several papers with Lee E. Ohanian assessing the impact of mortgage market interventions on employment recoveries. His dissertation research, which was awarded the Welton Prize in Macroeconomics at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Institute of Humane Studies Dissertation Fellowship, looks at the rise of unsecured credit access among the unemployed during the mid-1980s and its role in jobless recoveries. Herkenhoff’s article with Kris Gerardi, Lee Ohanian, and Paul Willen was also the first to use microeconomic-level data to establish that the primary driver of mortgage defaults during the crisis was income loss and unemployment. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.