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Essays in empirical economics
Full text linkThis dissertation investigates a variety of empirical questions in urban economics, public finance, and political economy.
Urban transportation networks affect residents by defining point-to-point traveling costs, and this mechanism is especially salient for commutes between home and work.
In chapter 1, I study the effect of changes in public transit fares on the demographics of a modern city. A 1981 policy by the London government mandated that underground train fares be simplified and resulted in a fare structure that was discontinuous over space, creating fare zones within which transit costs were uniform. I find that subway ridership responded significantly by decreasing in neighborhoods where fares were raised most, with commuters spilling over mostly to riding buses. I also find that the occupation mix became more working-class in areas where fares were raised most.
In chapter 2, my co-author and I explore the political repercussions of ethnic resi-dential segregation. We study the case of the South Asian ethnic group in the United Kingdom and find that the British National Party– a nativist political party with explicitly anti-South Asian immigration messaging– gained more electoral support in geographies with more ethnic segregation between South-Asian and White-British residents. We address endogeneity concerns by constructing an instrument for South Asian residential segregation using prior migration flows.
In chapter 3, I estimate with co-authors the risk-adjusted future net costs as-sociated with the Social Security program in the United States. We compare our risk-adjusted methodology with a simpler method estimating the risk-free expected net costs similar to the Social Security Administration’s own calculation. We find that omitting risk leads to a substantial underestimate of the value of net liabilities which will be incurred given the current tax and benefit formulas. Our own method employs arbitrage pricing theory by considering the future receipts and outlays from social security as a risky asset and marking this asset to market using stock market factors. Based on our preferred estimate, its market value is 86% higher than the So-cial Security trustees’ valuation method suggests, ranging from 74% to 115% higher than that of the Social Security Administration depending on the specification
The macroeconomic impacts of international trade and integration
Full text linkThe past few decades have seen an unprecedented rise in international trade and
integration. In addition to increasing trade flows of final goods and services, the
fragmentation of the production process across national borders has resulted in a
rise in trade of intermediate inputs. Countries also continue to expand and deepen
the rules governing international integration in a growing number of areas that have
become standard in modern free trade agreements, such as intellectual property. This
research explores three topics related to international trade in a highly integrated
world, showing that integration has resulted in some quantifiable benefits.
In the first chapter, I examine Western European industries that source intermediate
inputs from lower cost countries in Central and Eastern Europe. I use variation in
foreign sourcing driven by subsidies received by firms in Central and Eastern Europe
to identify the impact on Western European industries. Foreign sourcing is associated
with higher employment, wages per worker and higher skill employment. I also
discuss some of the potential costs, even though I do not attempt to quantify them.
Although every country benefits from foreign sourcing, the gains accrue to countries
that are most involved in regional supply chains.
The second chapter analyzes whether restrictive intellectual property provisions
improve or hurt access to biological medicines in Chile, finding that strong provisions
increase both the volume and unit value of imported medicines. The results indicate
that while both a market expansion effect that results in a greater ability to import
and market power effect that raises prices are present, the market expansion effect
dominates.
In the final chapter, I focus on a negative impact of integration, the potential
for imports to surge following job losses in certain occupations during the Great
Recession. I analyze whether changes in an occupation’s employment in a state
resulted in changes in the content of state imports. I find evidence that these changes
might be related, but no causal evidence to suggest that employment changes caused
changes in the content of imports
Essays on the market for higher education
Full text linkThe U.S. higher education market grew substantially between 2005 and 2015, with an increase in the number of programs offered of 13% and an increase in annual graduations of nearly 30%. Can government policy significantly impact student and college decisions? Does this market respond to occupation-specific growth? Are for-profit colleges more responsive to changes in demand? I shed light on these questions in this dissertation.
In Chapter 1, I estimate the impact of federal oversight on enrollment and completions at for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges experienced a 33% enrollment decline between 2010 and 2015 following an increase in federal oversight. Did oversight cause this decline? I assess the causal effect of two policies on for-profit enrollment: a significant report on misleading for-profit recruiting, and threatened federal student aid sanctions on under-performing colleges. I use a difference-in-difference framework that exploits the differential exposure of a treatment group to each policy. For the report, treatment is based on the presence of a local alternative; for sanctions, it is based on a debt-to-income threshold. Both policies significantly contributed to the enrollment decline: The report caused a 45% enrollment decline over 5 years at for-profit colleges with a nearby alternative, while the threat of sanctions led to a 121% greater enrollment decline at for-profit colleges below the performance threshold.
In Chapter 2, I estimate the causal response of graduations and programs offered to new licensing requirements. Using a difference-in-difference framework, I exploit state-level variation in new licensing statutes. I find that new licenses cause increases in both the number of graduations and programs offered in fields related to the licensed occupations. I further show that new licenses cause employment increases in college-level occupations and employment declines in low-education occupations.
In Chapter 3, I estimate program entry and exit due to labor demand shocks across college sectors. I find that the number of public and private non-profit Bachelor's degree programs offered increases following an employment increase in related occupations. However, I find no evidence of a similar response in the for-profit sector
Essays in monetary economics
No full text2024This dissertation consists of three chapters on macroeconomics and monetary economics. In the first chapter, I provide an equilibrium model of the pass-through of direct central bank lending to banks (CBL) into loans and quantitatively analyze the most significant such policy, the ECB’s Targeted Long Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO). The banking sector features bank market power in deposits and lending, and banks borrow funds from the central bank and choose to adjust deposits, liquid asset holdings, and loans. I embed this into a New Keynesian model in which aggregate loan demand and deposit supply are endogenous. I calibrate the model to match the cross-sectional empirical literature on TLTRO, allowing me to translate these micro estimates into an aggregate impact of CBL. I find a 32% pass-through of CBL into bank lending; correspondingly, an increase in central bank lending of 10% of outstanding loans provides stimulus equivalent to a 54 basis point cut to the policy rate. The model also implies that CBL will be more effective when banks hold few liquid assets and lending markets are more competitive.In the second chapter, I study how conventional and unconventional monetary policies differentially affect lending by banks in the United States. Using bank-level data and high-frequency instruments for standard monetary shocks and quantitative easing, I find that the two policies predominantly affect different types of banks as measured by their balance sheets. Interest rate shocks have a stronger impact on loans for banks that are illiquid, bigger, less capitalized, and less reliant on deposit funding. The opposite is true for quantitative easing shocks, where loans decline more in banks that are liquid, smaller, more capitalized, and more reliant on deposit funding. The amount of heterogeneity is large, with the more affected banks having a two to three times larger response of lending after three years.
The last chapter studies the fact that low-skilled workers tend to display both more cyclical employment and more cyclical earnings compared to high-skilled workers. I develop a model with wage stickiness, differential labor market frictions, and two sectors employing separately high and low-skilled workers. Firms face two cost components when they adjust employment: the wage paid to new employees and hiring costs. Although wages are more flexible in the low-skill sector, the hiring cost is more volatile in the high-skill sector. The implication is that total costs are more volatile for high-skilled workers, thus leading to a lower cyclicality in their employment while also preserving a lower cyclicality in their wages. The result is driven by different matching function elasticities (or equivalently bargaining powers) and Frisch elasticities for high and low-skilled workers
Three essays in macroeconomics
Full text linkThis dissertation consists of three chapters pertaining to retail markets and their broader economic implications. In the first chapter, I argue that the multi-product, one-stop shopping nature of retail markets implies significant amplification of nominal shocks while addressing a classic puzzle regarding item-level price volatility. The second chapter explores the properties of retailer pricing zones identified using a machine learning method. In the third chapter, I explore the propensity of households to switch grocery retailers following price increases of several goods.
The first chapter demonstrates that retail-level real rigidity is both quantitatively important and consistent with facts on retail pricing. Motivated by extensive literature on customer markets and retail pricing strategies, I construct a menu cost model in which demand occurs at the store-basket level and stores face incentives to keep their overall ``basket prices" near those of competitors. Calibrating the price concavity of store-level demand to basket price volatility in the NielsenIQ data, the model predicts that full price-level adjustment takes two and a half times as long as in a counterfactual CES model following a small monetary policy shock. Critically, retailer-level real rigidity is compatible with high volatility of item-level prices, a fact shown to be incompatible with item-level real rigidity by Klenow and Willis.
The second chapter, joint with Ian Meeker, develops a clustering method for identifying pricing zones in retail scanner data. We begin by documenting the self-identified pricing zones in the Dominick's Finer Foods data, and compare the efficacy of several different clustering methods in recovering these zones. After validating our method on an independent data set with known pricing zones, we use it to identify several pricing zones in the NielsenIQ Scanner Data. A post-hoc analysis of the identified zones reveals comparable properties to the self-identified Dominick's zones.
In the third chapter, I use high-frequency household and store micro-data from NielsenIQ to test the sensitivity of household exit decisions from grocery stores in response to both absolute and relative price changes at the store. This chapter extends prior empirical analyses by considering multiple retailers and allowing for an outsize influence of individual consumer goods on the exit decision. All specifications reveal that the probability that a household exits increases as prices observed at the store increase. The responses are larger when household-store expenditure shares are smaller
Essays in real estate and urban economics
No full text2025This dissertation consists of three chapters on real estate and urban economics. They examine how market forces and government policies affect distributional outcomes in the residential real estate market. The first chapter examines the shift in new construction toward larger, more expensive homes. I study the causes of this pattern and evaluate the equilibrium impacts of proposed housing policies aimed at improving affordability at the lower end of the market. I develop an equilibrium model of segmented housing markets with two key features: (1) heterogeneous household preferences for housing quality by demographics, and (2) endogenous housing supply with heterogeneous development costs by housing quality. Using microdata on household housing choices and parcel-specific development costs for single-family homes in the Atlanta MSA, I find that the shift toward large home construction is partly driven by demand from high-income households, who are less price-sensitive and prefer larger homes, but zoning density restrictions play a more significant role in limiting the construction of smaller homes. Relaxing these restrictions could expand the supply of small homes and benefit low-income households, but such zoning reforms are often politically challenging. As an alternative, I evaluate the impact of recently proposed housing subsidies targeting first-time homebuyers and starter homes. The model predicts that subsidizing young, low-income households provides substantial targeted welfare gains to recipients but hurts others due to rising prices. By contrast, subsidies to small home construction increase the supply of small homes but crowd out the construction of larger homes, resulting in modest welfare gains without effectively targeting those most in need. The second chapter, co-authored with Leonel Diego Drukker, examines the financial disparities Black homeowners face during the home-selling process. Using repeat-sale transactions from 2003 to 2020, we document that Black homeowners earn, on average, 0.36% lower annualized unlevered returns than non-Black sellers for similar properties. These racial disparities in housing returns cannot be explained by seller characteristics, property renovations, the buyer's race, seller agent fixed effects, and appraisal measures. However, we find significant racial gaps in listing prices and time on market, which we attribute to intermediaries involved in housing transactions. Controlling for these factors reduces the racial gap in returns to effectively zero. Additionally, we find that when homes are sold to iBuyers, where human intermediary bias is removed, the racial gap in housing returns disappears. Our findings suggest that Black sellers experience higher search frictions, leading to worse selling outcomes. The third chapter focuses on the entry of large institutional investors into the single-family rental market. Since 2012, institutional buy-to-rent (B2R) investors have entered the single-family rental market, converting a substantial number of owner-occupied homes into rental properties. This study examines the impact of B2R investors on nearby property values, providing reduced-form evidence on the size and origin of spillover effects resulting from their presence. I find that an additional property by B2R investors within 150 meters increases housing price growth by 2-3%. The impact is more pronounced in neighborhoods with a higher share of Black residents and lower property values. The reduced supply of owner-occupied housing and improvements in local amenities are key factors driving the positive spillover effects on housing prices
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Essays on monetary policy and the housing markets
Full text linkIn this dissertation, I study how monetary policy affects the euro area and the United States through the housing and mortgage markets. I do so by providing empirical evidence and by employing structural models calibrated to household balance sheets data.
In the first chapter, I build a quantitative currency-union New Keynesian model in which I incorporate key euro area housing and mortgage market structural features. My results reveal that a higher adjustable-rate mortgage share and a higher homeownership rate interact to amplify the effects of monetary policy on economic activity due to smaller mortgage interest payments and a higher fraction of mortgaged homeowners operating in the market. I use the model to show that a euro-area-wide mortgage market requiring shared financial regulation decreases the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy by weakening the pass-through to average mortgage interest rates.
In the second chapter, I empirically show that monetary policy has heterogeneous effects across euro area countries. I provide evidence of strong correlations between cross-country monetary policy potency and housing and mortgage market institutions, namely the share of adjustable-rate mortgages and the homeownership rate. This study highlights that the housing and mortgage markets play an important role in determining the potency of monetary policy across countries in the eurozone.
The last chapter shows that house price changes are strongly correlated in the US data following monetary policy shocks. I build a New Keynesian model of the housing market where households choose the optimal amount of housing and mortgages. To accommodate realistic house price movements, I extend the housing market structure to include search frictions and house price rigidity so that the housing market clears through the relative fraction of successful buyers and sellers each period. I show that the house price momentum does not translate into slow movements of output and therefore it cannot explain the high degree of persistence found in the data following a contractionary monetary shock. I also highlight important redistributional effects between savers and borrowers in the economy. In particular, house price momentum coupled with the loan-to-value constraint forces the indebted households to cut their consumption for several quarters following a contractionary monetary shock
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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