Research

My fields of interest are labor and public economics. I generally gravitate towards questions related to children/families’ health, education, labor supply decisions, and social safety net program design.

At the Fed, I work in the Empirical Macro section of the Research department, supporting the research of Senior Economic Advisor and Economist Shigeru Fujita. Much of Shigeru’s work analyzes individual-level data to understand how the real-world experiences of individuals drive macro-level trends and labor market dynamics. As such, my research work involves primarily microeconomic data and methods. I also spend a portion of my time working on the PRISM-II DSGE model with Shigeru and the other empirical macroeconomists.

I coauthored an article on the Child Tax Credit for the Philadelphia Fed’s research publication, Economic Insights.

I am currently conducting research on the intergenerational transmission of occupation skill and preference. I’m interested in determining whether certain professions have become more or less “heritable” over time and estimating the task-based similarity between parent and child occupations.

I have extensive familiarity with CPS basic monthly, CPS ASEC, and PSID data. I have also worked with the Fujita-Ramey expanded Palmer data that captures entire labor market histories of persons in 6 major US cities during the 1940s. I have compiled and cleaned a bespoke dataset of school facilies condition assessments in Philadelphia. I have also worked with restricted-access Social Security data, the Health and Retirement Survey, American Community Survey, and a variety of macroeconomic indicator time series data.

Personal Projects

I am working on a project exploring the relationship between immigration and refusal rates in the Current Population Survey. I am interested in estimating the degree to which undocumented immigration is driving increased non-response and, specifically, refusal in the CPS. I also hope to better understand how increasing refusal rates may be producing biased employment statistics because of the populations they are unable to capture. I hope to produce a reweighting process for the CPS that helps compensate for the structural under-capture of immigrants, providing a (hopefully more representative) picture of the labor market that reconciles household and payroll surveys.

In my personal time, I am also working on a project involving facilities condition data from the School District of Philadelphia. My project explores the intertemporal relationships between facilities quality and a variety of school-specific observables, including demographic makeup, catchment retention and enrollment flows, and student attendance. I am also incorporating real estate data to examine whether school facilities decline is capitalized in catchment home values.

Older work

I wrote my undergrad thesis on the impacts of variable access to childcare subsidies on labor supply decisions and welfare program participation. In it, I examine the ways in which accessible childcare alters the screening effects of welfare work requirements and whether the presence of accessible childcare reduces the disincentives to work inherent to receipt of welfare benefits. Using the Supplemental Nutrition Access Program as my program of interest, I leverage the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care Development Block Grant and accompanying nationwide changes to eligibility requirements and recertification periods.

My 2021 Spring term paper, completed under supervision of L. Friedberg (UVA), was the recipient of UVA Economics Department award for “Best Public Policy Paper By An Undergraduate”. A longer look at merit aid, educational attainment, and post-degree migration decisions