Research
My name is Senan, and I am a labour economist. I am in the 5th year of an Economics PhD at Cornell University, where I am building my dissertation.
Working Papers
Less Funding, More Lecturers, and Fewer Professors: Stagnating State Funding for Higher Education and its Effect on Faculty (2024)
Empirical economics project that causally links two recent trends:
- Public universities’ substitution towards contingent lecturers and teaching faculty, away from tenure-track/tenured professors
- Stagnating state funding for US public universities.
The analysis uses a shift-share approach to show that declining state funding explains the substitution towards lecturers away from professors. Analysis of every public university faculty member in Illinois shows that incumbent professors are unaffected, implying changes in faculty composition at public universities arise via falls in future hiring after funding cuts.
Work in Progress
The Direct and Indirect Effects of Genetics and Education (2024–)
Recent advances in genetic technology measure genetic locations in the human genome associated with health and social outcomes, such as years of education — polygenic indices. I show how that the Education year PolyGenic Index (Ed PGI, Lee et al 2018) is related to later-life earnings, using random variation away from parents’ genes to infer causal effects. A nascent social science literature has speculated that genes associated with education relate to intelligence, and so would have independent, direct genetic effects on labour market outcomes. I investigate this systematically by decomposing the causal effects into a direct genetic effect, and an indirect effect from returns to education, using genetic and labour market data for thousands of members of the British public in the UK Biobank. I derive selection bias terms for conventional mediation methods when education is not randomly assigned — as is likely for any mediator for any natural experiment. To avoid this, I use a legal change in school-leaving age to instrument for random variation in education, estimating direct and indirect effects local to these compliers. Correlational evidence with public data shows that direct genetic associations are indistinguishable from zero — all causal associations of the Ed PGI are explained by the indirect education channel, and not by a direct genetic channel. Causal estimates using restricted UK Biobank data are to follow.
Food Insecurity Among Military Veterans (2023–), joint with Seungmin Lee (Notre Dame), Chris Barrett, John Hoddinott (Cornell), Matthew Rabbitt (USDA)
Economics project measuring food insecurity among military veterans, using newly crafted data from the PSID to causally measure the impact of military enlistment on food insecurity outcomes.
Estimates of US Food Insecurity Dynamics: Measuring Food Insecurity Across the US with a New Synthetic Panel Approach (2023–), joint with Seungmin Lee, Chris Barrett, John Hoddinott (Cornell)
Economics project measuring food insecurity, with new applied econometrics methods to infer time dynamics in the absence of explicit panel data, measuring food insecurity in the US Census (CPS-FSS).
Market Interventions in a Large-Scale Virtual Economy (2022), joint with Peter Xenopoulos, Claudio Silva (NYU)
Study of large market interventions in an online multiplayer game’s economy, and the causal effects on market activity. Combines insights from applied econometrics and data science in the study of virtual games.