Karyen Chu is Chief of the Consumer Finance Research section in the FDIC’s Division of Insurance and Research. Staff in the section conduct research on consumer finance topics such as mortgages and savings, and have staffed official FDIC studies and pilot programs including the FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households, the FDIC National Survey of Banks' Efforts to Serve the Unbanked and Underbanked,the FDIC Study of Bank Overdraft Programs and the FDIC Small-Dollar Loan Pilot Project. Staff in the section also provide analytic support for policy-making and statistical modeling support for fair lending examinations and unfair and deceptive acts and practices (UDAP) enforcement cases to the FDIC’s Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection.
Previously, Karyen was a health policy researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, where she worked on studies of Medicaid managed care and health care market changes. Karyen received her PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a Masters in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelors of Arts from Occidental College.