About Me

Welcome to the personal website of Matthew Pesavento. I completed my PhD from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University in August 2024. I am now a post doctoral scholar for the Collaborative for Financial Equity and Inclusion. I primarily study questions related to the household financial effects of medical disease, with specific focus on economic mobility and inter-generational wealth transfer. I have also studied questions related to regulation and unemployment insurance.

As a research assistant and scholar during my years at Ohio State, I have helped build the Ohio State University Consumer Credit Panel (OSU CCP) and the various administrative datasets that have been connected to it. This effort at the Ohio State University brings together the universe of consumer credit records for Ohio residents (via Experian), as well as a panel of a random sample of individuals nationally. In order to answer questions related to the entire household, as well as to the individual specifically, our team leverages this universe of consumers to define household relationships. Our team also focuses on creating novel linkages between the OSU CCP and administrative datasets from various State of Ohio government departments (e.g. labor force engagement, unemployment insurance, affordable housing programs, the state cancer registry, and higher education) and medical facilities (e.g. Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center). This effort allows us to have arguably the clearest view into individuals’ behaviors, preferences, and financial distress of any team around the country.

Before entering graduate school, I graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Economics. I then entered an analytics development program at Cardinal Health Inc., where I worked primarily in advanced analytics and strategic pricing. There, I helped build an algorithm to reshape sales territories of medical sales representatives across the country. Together with my two teammates, this effort was recognized as the top advanced analytics project of the year 2016-2017 across the entire (Fortune 15) company. After two years at Cardinal Health, I returned to academia, completing the pre-doctoral MA in Economics at Miami University, and subsequently entering the PhD program at the Ohio State University.

When I am not working, I enjoy spending time with my wife and three small children. I am a wine enthusiast, USSF soccer referee, Ironman triathlete, and amateur genealogist. I am a dual-citizen of the United States and Italy.