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.
Publications
Aggregate recruiting intensity - Slides, Paper,  Appendix
​- 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 procyclical 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.
Under revision
Assets and job choice: Student debt, wages and amenities - Slides,  Paper  (Revise and resubmit - Review of Economic Studies)
​- with Mi Luo  (Emory University), NBER Working Paper 25801
If consumption and non-wage amenities of work enter utility, holding few assets may induce a trade-off between wages and amenities when searching for a job. We establish this in a model of search with asset accumulation, extended to accommodate amenities. We then provide empirical evidence of this trade-off in the context of student debt, finding that higher debt causes graduates to accept jobs with higher wages and lower job satisfaction. In a representative sample of college graduates, we infer causality by exploiting within-college, across cohort changes in financial aid. A quantitative extension of our theoretical framework that explicitly models student debt accounts well for our empirical results. Identifying the utility value of amenities through observed search behavior, we find that high satisfaction jobs are valued at 6 percent of lifetime consumption relative to low satisfaction jobs. This trade-off is economically significant; a policy maker using only wage data to assess the welfare effects of with an income-based repayment policy would mistakenly conclude that graduates prefer a fixed repayment policy.
Labor market power  -  Paper , Slides (Revise and resubmit - American Economic Review)
​- with David Berger  (Duke University), Kyle Herkenhoff  (Federal Reserve Bank of New York). NBER Working Paper 25719 , IZA Discussion Paper 12276
We develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market that we use to measure the macroeconomic implications of labor market power. Strategic interaction complicates inference of parameters that are key to this exercise. To address this challenge, we contribute estimates of market share dependent wage and employment responses to state corporate tax changes in U.S. Census data, which we combine with the structure of the model. We validate against the distribution of local labor market concentration and quasi-experimental evidence on productivity-wage pass-through. Relative to a counterfactual competitive economy, and accounting for transition dynamics, we measure welfare losses from labor market power to be roughly 5 percent of lifetime consumption. Minimum wage and merger experiments caution that concentration and welfare may not negatively comove.
Firm and worker dynamics in a frictional labor market -  Slides, Paper (Revise and resubmit - Econometrica)
​- with Adrien Bilal  (PhD student, Princeton), Niklas Engbom (NYU Stern),  Gianluca Violante  (Princeton).  NBER Working Paper 26547
This paper develops a random-matching model of a frictional labor market with firm and worker dynamics. Multi-worker firms choose whether to shrink or expand their employment in response to shocks to their decreasing returns to scale technology. Growing entails posting costly vacancies, which are filled either by the unemployed or by employees poached from other firms. Firms also choose when to enter and exit the market. Tractability is obtained by proving that, under a parsimonious set of assumptions, all workers’ and firm decisions are characterized by their joint marginal surplus, which in turn only depends on the firm’s productivity and size. As frictions vanish, the model converges to a standard competitive model of firm dynamics which allows a quantification of the misallocation cost of labor market frictions. An estimated version of the model yields cross-sectional patterns of net poaching by firm characteristics (e.g., age and size) that are in line with the micro data. The model also generates a drop in job-to-job transitions as firm entry declines, offering an interpretation to U.S. labor market dynamics around the Great Recession. All these outcomes are a reflection of the job ladder in marginal surplus that emerges in equilibrium.
Working papers
An SEIR infectious disease model with testing and conditional quarantine  -  Updated version, NBER Working Paper 26901 ,  BFI Working paper 2020-25
​- with David Berger  (Duke University), Kyle Herkenhoff  (Federal Reserve Bank of New York).

Model - Three options: (i) Run online in browser as a Jupyter notebook via Binder (no software needed), (ii)  Download underlying model files, (iii) Github

We extend the baseline Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) infectious disease epidemiology model to understand the role of testing and case-dependent quarantine. Our model nests the SEIR model. During a period of asymptomatic infection, testing can reveal infection that otherwise would only be revealed later when symptoms develop. Along with those displaying symptoms, such individuals are deemed known positive cases. Quarantine policy is case-dependent in that it can depend on whether a case is unknown, known positive, known negative, or recovered. Testing therefore makes possible the identification and quarantine of infected individuals and release of non-infected individuals. We fix a quarantine technology---a parameter determining the differential rate of transmission in quarantine---and compare simple testing and quarantine policies. We start with a baseline quarantine-only policy that replicates the rate at which individuals are entering quarantine in the US in March, 2020. We show that the total deaths that occur under this policy can be achieved under looser quarantine measures and a substantial increase in random testing of asymptomatic individuals. Testing at a higher rate, in conjunction with targeted quarantine policies can (i) dampen the economic impact of the coronavirus and (ii) reduce peak symptomatic infections---relevant for hospital capacity constraints. Our model can be plugged into richer quantitative extensions of the SEIR model of the kind currently being used to forecast the effects of public health and economic policies.
Macro recruiting intensity from micro data  -  Paper
​- with Gianluca Violante  (Princeton).  NBER Working Paper 26231

We merge QCEW and JOLTS microdata to study the recruiting intensity of firms in the cross-section and over time. We show that vast establishment-level heterogeneity in vacancy filling rates is entirely explained by differences in gross hiring rates. We provide theory that supports these empirical facts and, through the lens of this theory, aggregate firm-level decisions and data into an empirical measure of aggregate recruiting intensity (ARI). We find that procyclicality of ARI is primarily due to cutting recruiting effort in slack labor markets. This leads us to formulate an ARI index easily computable from publicly available macroeconomic time series. Declining ARI in the Great Recession accounted for much of the increase in unemployment, but little of its persistence.
Market structure and monetary non-neutrality - Slides, Paper
Updated May, 2019
I study a general equilibrium menu cost model with a continuum of sectors, with the novel feature that each sector consists of strategically engaged firms. Compared to an economy with monopolistically competitive sectors-- separately parameterized to match the same microdata on price flexibility---the oligopoly economy features a smaller inflationary response to monetary shocks and output responses that are more than twice as large. The model also (i) requires smaller menu costs and idiosyncratic shocks to match the data, addressing a well-known challenge for mechanisms that generate non-neutrality via strategic complementarities, (ii) implies four times larger welfare losses from nominal rigidities, and (iii) that firms prefer some nominal rigidity to completely flexible prices. When evaluated under the same parameters prices adjust half as much in the oligopoly economy. Barcode-level data supports this finding. There is a negative within-good, across-region relationship between wholesale-firm market concentration and price flexibility.
Firm dispersion and business cycles: Estimating aggregate shocks using panel data - Slides, Paper
​- with Jerome Williams  (Cornerstone)
Updated January, 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.
In progress
Quantifying market power and business dynamism -  Slides
​- with Jan De Loecker  (KU Leuven), Jan Eeckhout  (UCL).
Presented: (2019) AEA  (Atlanta), UC Santa Barbara, RBA, Richmond Fed 'Market Structure and Macroeconomy' workshop, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Essex, PSE, TSE
Unbundling labor -  Slides 
​- with Chris Edmond  (University of Melbourne)
Presented: (2019) University of Melbourne, SED, SITE, UCLA, University of Chicago, NY Fed