Research
My research is generally in the field of labour economics, with a number of different applications. I am in the fourth year of an Economics PhD at Cornell University, where I am contributing to multiple projects to build 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 Attainment (2023–)
Recent advances in genetic technology have allowed researchers to identify and measure genetic locations in the human genome associated with health and social outcomes, such as education attainment. These measures are genetic scores, and a nascent literature economic literature documents how the education attainment genetic score (EA score, Lee at al. 2018) is related to many outcomes, including retirement wealth, life-cycle income, elementary school performance, and longevity. This work re-analyses the claims that the EA score affects outcomes directly or via further education attainment. I use genetic and labour market data on retirement-age Americans from the Health and Retirement Study, together with insights from Mendelian randomisation and causal mediation methods to decompose the direct and indirect effects of genetic predisposition on later-life earnings. Preliminary results show that effects of EA score on later life earnings explain are roughly half returns to education and half direct genetic effects. These methods rely on a selection-on-observables assumption for selection into education, which is unlikely to hold true in practice. I develop expressions for selection bias in causal mediation estimators, and establish that these terms likely lead to under-estimates of the direct genetic effects thanks to positive unobserved selection into education. These results add causal structure to claims that EA score affects outcomes directly, and set the stage for further research disentangling the direct and indirect effects of new genetic measures.
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, furthering applied econometrics methods to infer time dynamics in the absence of explicit panel data, and 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.