Joint with Guillermo Ordoñez.
Abstract: While
some policies can enhance welfare, they may also
provide rents to politicians on occasion.
Opportunism is usually constrained by the
policymakers' reputation concerns. However, if
instances of rent-seeking are not easily identified,
the strength of this concern hinges critically on
the informed constituents' ability to share their
knowledge with the rest of society. We show that
governments use excessive redistribution to
discourage information sharing. In contrast to the
standard view that inefficient policies are
necessary to implement redistribution, we argue that
redistribution can perpetuate inefficient policies
that generate private rents. The model matches
salient stylized facts on redistribution.
[PDF - August 2016] (Review of Economic
Dynamics, Vol. 22, 223-239)
[Online Appendix]
Labor Market Conflict and the Decline
of the Rust Belt
Joint with David
Lagakos and Lee Ohanian.
Abstract:
No region of the United States fared worse over the
postwar period than the "Rust Belt," the heavy
manufacturing region bordering the Great
Lakes. This paper hypothesizes that the
decline of the Rust Belt was due in large part to
the persistent labor market conflict that was
prevalent throughout the Rust Belt's main
industries. We formalize this thesis in a two-region
dynamic general equilibrium model in which labor
market conflict leads to a hold-up problem in the
Rust Belt that reduces investment and productivity
growth and leads employment to move from the Rust
Belt to the rest of the country. Quantitatively, the
model accounts for much of the large secular decline
in the Rust Belt's share of manufacturing
employment. Consistent with our theory, data at the
state-industry level show that labor conflict,
proxied by rates of major work stoppages, is
strongly negatively correlated with employment
growth.
working
papers
The Allocation of Teaching Talent and Human
Capital Accumulation
Joint with Yulia
Dudareva and Ananth Seshadri.
Current version:
August 31, 2025 | revision in progress and available
shortly
Abstract: The
educational landscape in the U.S. has gone through
major changes since the end of World War II. Real
expenditures per student have risen from
approximately $2,100 to more than $10,000 by the
turn of the century and more than $12,000 since the
Great Recession. At the same time, the
student-teacher ratio has fallen from a national
average of almost 27 in 1955 to 16 by the 2010s. Yet
despite the rise in expenditures and the reduction
in class sizes, educational outcomes in the U.S.
don't compare very favorably with countries at
similar income levels. One aspect of U.S. education
that has not garnered a lot of attention until
fairly recently is occupational choice. We add an
education sector to an otherwise standard Hsieh et
al. (2019)-style model to explore the extent to
which changes in career opportunities in other
occupations affect the selection of workers into
teaching careers. In our model, changes in the
allocation of teaching talent have implications for
the evolution of class size as well as quality of
instruction and hence the accumulation of human
capital during the workers' formative years. This
gives rise to a trade-off between static and dynamic
efficiency, which we quantify by way of a structural
model. In order to discipline the parameterization
of the model, we compare model-generated moments to
their empirical counterparts in three longitudinal
surveys: Project TALENT, the NLSY79, and NLSY97.
Project TALENT surveys 377,000 U.S. high school
students in 1960 and follows them for more than a
decade. Together with the two NLSY's, it provides a
detailed account of, among many others, the
educational trajectories and career paths of young
American adults over the course of more than four
decades.
The
Macroeconomics of Sorting and Turnover in a Dynamic
Assignment Model
Joint with Fane
Groes.
Current version:
June 13, 2023 | revision in progress
Abstract:
We build a tractable assignment model to
characterize the matching and separation patterns of
CEOs and their employers. Managers learn about their
own type by observing a sequence of public signals
(productivity shocks). The sorting is ex ante
perfect across managers of a given cohort who are
not currently matched (either because they were
unmatched in the previous period or because they
decided to split from their previous match), but is
not typically so ex post. Moreover, in the special
case with costless matching, perfect ex ante sorting
occurs across managers of a given cohort regardless
of their assignment history. We calibrate the model
to match empirical targets from a large matched
employer-employee data set covering the Danish labor
force between 2000 and 2009. We have a particular
interest in the degree of complementarity between
the characteristics of the manager and those of the
firm in the production function and our results fill
a gap in the literature on the aggregate effects of
a particular form of misallocation, namely mismatch,
which depend critically on this elasticity.
work
in progress
Dynamic Sorting
Joint with
Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn and Lee Ohanian.
Industrial Clusters Across Time and Space
older research
The International
Diversification Puzzle Revisited
research
statement
[Research
Statement 2017]
graduate research experience
research
assistant
| Prof.
Matthias Doepke (UCLA)
(january 2007 - december 2008)
research assistant | Anderson Forecast, Anderson
School of Management (UCLA)
(september 2004 - september
2005)