Research
Job Market Paper
- Treatment Effects in Bunching Designs: The Impact of the Federal Overtime Rule on Hours
- [Supplemental Material]
- Abstract: The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) mandates overtime premium pay for most U.S. workers, but a lack of variation in the rule has made it difficult to assess its impact on hours worked. I use bunching observed at 40 hours in a new administrative dataset of weekly paychecks to estimate this effect. To do so, I develop a framework in which bunching at a choice-set kink is informative about causal effects in a way that is robust across underlying structural models, generalizing previous approaches. Under a non-parametric shape constraint on the distribution of hours and flexible assumptions on choice, a local average treatment effect among bunchers is partially identified. The bounds are informative in the overtime context and suggest that covered hourly workers in the U.S. work an average of at least half an hour less as a result of the FLSA mandate, in weeks that they do work at least 40 hours. This delivers an estimate of the wage elasticity of hours demand of -0.04.
- A Vector Monotonicity Assumption for Multiple Instruments
- [Supplemental Material]
- Abstract: When a researcher wishes to use multiple instrumental variables for a single binary treatment, the familiar LATE monotonicity assumption can become restrictive: it requires that all units share a common direction of response even when different instruments are shifted in opposing directions. What I call vector monotonicity, by contrast, simply restricts treatment status to be monotonic in each instrument separately. This is a natural assumption in many contexts, capturing the intuitive notion of "no defiers" for each instrument. I show that in a setting with a binary treatment and multiple discrete instruments, a class of causal parameters is point identified under vector monotonicity, including the average treatment effect among units that are responsive to any particular subset of the instruments. I propose a simple "2SLS-like" estimator for the family of identified treatment effect parameters. An empirical application revisits the labor market returns to college education.
- The Career Impact of First Jobs: Evidence and Labor Market Design Lessons from Randomized Choice Sets
- (with Ashna Arora and Jonas Hjort) See below for accompanying AEA P&P.
- Do Firms Fully Exploit Their Labor Market Power in Setting Wages? Evidence from Canada
- (with Matthew Mazewski)
- Pure-Chance Jobs vs. a Labor Market: The Impact on Careers of a Random Serial Dictatorship for First Job Seekers
- (with Ashna Arora and Jonas Hjort)
- Forthcoming, American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings.
- Does Forest Certification Stem Tropical Deforestation? Forest Stewardship Council Certification in Mexico
- (with Allen Blackman and Marisol Rivera Planter)
- Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 89 (2018).
- Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond `Free'
- (with Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Diego Jiménez Hernández, Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl)
- American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings, Vol. 108 (2018).
- Inequality of Subjective Well-Being as a Comprehensive Measure of Inequality
- (with John Helliwell and Guy Mayraz)
- Economic Inquiry, Vol. 54 (2018), Issue 4.
- The Forest Conservation Targeting Tool: Accessible spatial prioritization for Latin America and the Dominican Republic
- (with Allen Blackman, Jessica Chu, and Juha Siikamäki)
- SoftwareX, Vol. 10 (2019), 100293.
- Classical Simulation of Measurement Based Quantum Computation on Higher Genus Surface Code States
- (with Robert Raussendorf)
- Physical Review A, Vol. 86 (2012), 042301.
- [arXiv version]
- Correlation Between Particle Motion and Voronoi-Cell-Shape Fluctuations During the Compaction of Granular Matter
- (with Stevie Slotterback, Masahiro Toiya, Jack F. Douglas, and Wolfgang Losert)
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 101 (2008), 258001.
Working Papers
Work in Progress
Publications
Curriculum Vitae
Teaching Materials
Senior Honors Thesis Workshop (Fall 2019; Columbia ECON GU4999)
(Professor: Michael Best)- Getting started with R
- [Slides]
- Jupyter notebook: [As webpage] [Download]
- Example solution to the Project: [R script]
- Getting started with LaTeX
Microeconometrics (Fall 2018; Columbia ECON GR6414)
- (Professors: Simon Lee and Joshua Angrist)
Code
Some software projects:
-
rdbounds function (Stata and R) for manipulation-robust bounds in regression discontinuity designs:
- This is work with François Gerard, Miikka Rokkanen & Christoph Rothe, to implement the estimator proposed in their paper: Bounds on Treatment Effects in Regression Discontinuity Designs with a Manipulated Running Variable.
- [Download from GitHub]
-
Forest Conservation Targeting Tool
- This is work with Allen Blackman, Jessica Chu, and Juha Siikamäki, and the SERVIR project. It was one of my projects while a Research Assistant at Resources for the Future.
- [Tool] [Paper]
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