Eduard Nilaj is an economist and data scientist studying household finance and public policy. He is a visiting senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a fellow at Protect Borrowers and the Jain Family Institute, where he spent five years as a senior research associate. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from The New School for Social Research in 2025.
His research focuses on household debt: who owes it, why it keeps growing, and what it means for the families who carry it. Most of his work starts with consumer credit panel data. At JFI he helped build the Millennial Student Debt project, which mapped student debt down to the county level, and co-wrote some of the first empirical work on what happens to borrowers when their student debt is cancelled — research later cited in an economists’ amicus brief to the Supreme Court. His current work tracks household financial distress more broadly, from the spike in student loan delinquencies to credit cards, auto loans, and utility bills, along with the economics of the energy transition, where he has built benchmarks and tools for understanding critical mineral markets.
Education
Ph.D. in Economics, The New School for Social Research, 2025
M.Sc. in Economics, The New School for Social Research, 2017
BBA (Honors), CUNY Lehman College, 2012