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I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
I received my PhD in Economics from New York University in 2017 and was a Junior Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2017/18.
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Publications
Aggregate recruiting intensity - Slides, Paper, Appendix
- with Alessandro Gavazza (LSE), Gianluca Violante (Princeton)
American Economic Review, Vol. 108, No. 8, August 2018
- with Alessandro Gavazza (LSE), Gianluca Violante (Princeton)
American Economic Review, Vol. 108, No. 8, August 2018
We develop an equilibrium model of firm dynamics with random search in the labor market where hiring firms exert recruiting effort by spending resources to fill vacancies faster. Consistent with microevidence, fast-growing firms invest more in recruiting activities and achieve higher job-filling rates. These hiring decisions of firms aggregate into an index of economywide recruiting intensity. We study how aggregate shocks transmit to recruiting intensity, and whether this channel can account for the dynamics of aggregate matching efficiency during the Great Recession. Productivity and financial shocks lead to sizable pro-cyclical fluctuations in matching efficiency through recruiting effort. Quantitatively, the main mechanism is that firms attain their employment targets by adjusting their recruiting effort in response to movements in labor market slackness.
Working papers
I study a general equilibrium menu cost model with a continuum of sectors, each consisting of strategically engaged firms. Compared to an economy with monopolistically competitive sectors—separately parameterized to match the same data on good-level price flexibility—the duopoly economy features a smaller inflation response to monetary shocks and output responses that are more than twice as large. The model (i) requires smaller menu costs and idiosyncratic shocks to match the data, addressing a challenge for mechanisms that generate non-neutrality via micro-complementarities, (ii) implies four times larger welfare losses from nominal rigidities, and (iii) rationalizes small, positive menu costs: firms prefer a small degree of nominal rigidity. When evaluated under the same parameters, output responses in the duopoly economy are more than five times as large, and prices adjust half as much. Barcode-level data supports this finding. There is a negative within-good, across-region relationship between wholesale-firm market concentration and price flexibility.
Assets and Job Choice: Student Debt, Wages and Amenities- Slides
- with Mi Luo (Emory University)
New draft coming soon. Available on request.
- with Mi Luo (Emory University)
New draft coming soon. Available on request.
Higher student debt causes college students to take jobs with higher wages and lower job satisfaction. We arrive at this finding using representative samples of college graduates and exploiting within-college across-cohort variation in financial aid policies for identification. We prove that an extending the search with asset accumulation framework of Lise (2013) to include non-pecuniary amenities rationalizes our empirical findings: higher debt tilts acceptance policies toward high wage, low amenity jobs. In a quantitative extension we identify the utility value of amenities through observed search behavior conditional on reported job satisfaction and income, finding that high satisfaction jobs are valued at 6 percent of lifetime consumption relative to low satisfaction jobs. This trade-off is large enough that computing welfare gains in a counterfactual income-based repayment policy using only wages leads to a mistaken inference that students prefer a fixed repayment policy.
Firm dispersion and business cycles: Estimating aggregate shocks using panel data - Slides, Paper
- with Jerome Williams (Cornerstone)
Updated January 5, 2016
- with Jerome Williams (Cornerstone)
Updated January 5, 2016
Are fluctuations in firm-level dispersion a cause or effect of business cycles? To answer this question, we estimate general equilibrium model rich enough to jointly explain characteristics of the firm distribution and the dynamics of macroeconomic aggregates. The model includes frictions that generate movements in dispersion following standard macroeconomic shocks such as aggregate productivity, as well as a direct shock to the dispersion of firm level productivity growth. This type of general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and aggregate shocks is computationally difficult to solve, which typically keeps likelihood-based estimation out of reach. We exploit recent advances in solution techniques to obtain a characterization for which estimation is feasible. To answer our question we estimate the model using time series of both macroeconomic aggregates and newly constructed cross-sectional time series, which reflect movements in the firm distribution over time. Now able to account for firm dispersion and the business cycle, we find that (i) standard macroeconomic aggregate shocks explain almost all of the variation in macroeconomic aggregates, (ii) an uncertainty shock explains almost all of the variation in firm-level dispersion.
Works in progress
Firm and worker dynamics in a frictional labor market - Slides
- with Adrien Bilal (PhD student, Princeton), Niklas Engbom (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis), Gianluca Violante (Princeton)
- with Adrien Bilal (PhD student, Princeton), Niklas Engbom (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis), Gianluca Violante (Princeton)
Labor market concentration and welfare - Slides
- with David Berger (Northwestern), Kyle Herkenhoff (UMN)
- with David Berger (Northwestern), Kyle Herkenhoff (UMN)