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I am an assistant professor in economics at Yale University.
My research combines economics and econometrics methods with large administrative data to inform policy. My work focuses largely on education and housing. In education, my work focuses on understanding human capital investments, measuring the returns to investments, the role of non-cognitive skills, and how educational and career dynamics are affected by public policy. In housing, my work focuses on quantifying the prevalence and impact of evictions, and on evaluating policies designed to benefit low-income renters and prevent homelessness. My CV is available here.
I am an NBER Faculty Research Fellow (Labor Studies and Economics of Education), member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity "Inequality: Measurement, Interpretation, and Policy" working group (MIP), an affiliate of the CESifo Research Network, and an affiliate of the Inclusive Economy Lab. I grew up in Eagle River, Alaska and enjoy backpacking, cross-country skiing, and blues guitar.My office is room B335 in 87 Trumbull St. and I can be contacted at [email protected].
Yale undergraduates interested in working as a research assistant, see instructions here.This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents’ earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents’ labor market outcomes as well as educational expenditures and children’s academic performance. During children’s pre-kindergarten years, UPK enrollment increases weekly childcare coverage by 11 hours. Enrollment has limited impacts on children’s academic outcomes between kindergarten and 8th grade, likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and substitution away from other programs of similar quality but with shorter days. In contrast, parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents’ earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents’ earnings gains. This return is large compared to other labor market policies. Conversely, excluding earnings gains for parents, each dollar of net government expenditure yields only $0.46 to $1.32 in benefits, lower than many other education and children’s health interventions. We conclude that the economic returns to investing in UPK are high, largely because of full-day UPK’s effectiveness as an active labor market policy.
Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who are recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We develop an empirical framework for studying the consequences of noncarceral conviction by extending the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when they are not met. Under the identifying assumptions, we find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration relative to noncarceral conviction leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. While the identifying assumptions include a strong restriction on judge decision-making, we argue that any bias resulting from its failure is unlikely to change our qualitative conclusions. Lastly, we introduce an alternative empirical strategy, and find that it yields similar estimates. Collectively, these results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and potentially overlooked driver of recidivism.
[Condtionally accepted at the Quarterly Journal of Economics]