WORKING PAPERS

“Remote Work: Impacts on Residential Choice and Public Finance” (Census Project 3327)
How do individuals adjust their residential choices when they transition to remote work, and how do these impact state and local governments? Commuting costs historically limited workers’ ability to choose neighborhoods and jurisdictions based on amenities, cost, services, and tax rates. However, remote work eliminates such costs, enabling workers to reconsider their location choices. I propose a novel instrument using quasi-random variation in office lease expirations, which enables firms to adopt remote policies. Exposure to office lease expirations, through a Bartik-like measure at the residential block level, predicts self-reported remote work for individuals and higher remote work rates within neighborhoods. Remote workers increase migration, utilization of public schools, and migration for preferable tax treatment, with ambiguous effects on demographic sorting. Remote workers increase housing and property tax spending without necessarily expanding home size, suggesting greater demand for neighborhood amenities and services. At the neighborhood level, higher 2020 remote work shares increased residential turnover, demographic clustering, and property taxes, consistent with migration and reassessments. The results demonstrate that remote work induces migration consistent with Tiebout sorting and provide a new explanation for recent migration patterns. They suggest that jurisdictions can no longer rely on employment concentration or low costs of living to retain residents and prevent tax base erosion, but must now deliver high-value public services and amenities. Work in progress will explore the mechanisms driving these results, such as impacts of remote work on earnings, leisure time, fertility, and household formation.

“Skill Mismatch and Career Success” (with Julie Cullen and Gordon Dahl). NBER Working Paper No. 34215
How does being over- or underqualified at the beginning of a worker's career affect further skill acquisition, retention, and promotion? Previous attempts at estimating the effects of relative ability on labor market outcomes have been limited by self-selection into occupations and the difficulty of measuring relevant skills. We tackle these issues in the context of the Air Force, which allocates new enlistees to over 130 different jobs based, in part, on test scores. Using these test scores, we create simulated job assignments based on factors outside of an individual's control: the available slots in upcoming training programs and the quality of other recruits entering at the same time. These factor create quasi-random variation in job assignment and hence how cognitively demanding an individual's job is relative to their own ability. We find that being overqualified for a job causes individuals to attrit at higher rates, both during technical training and after they are working in their assigned jobs. It also results in more behavioral problems and lower performance on general knowledge tests about the military taken by all workers. On the other hand, overqualification results in better performance relative to one’s peers in a job: job-specific test scores rise both during technical training and while on the job, and individuals are more likely to receive positive performance evaluations and be promoted. These patterns suggest that overqualified individuals are less motivated, but when judged relative to their peers still outperform them. Underqualification results in the polar opposite: it decreases attrition, reduces behavioral problems, and increases general knowledge, but also lowers performance relative to peers on job-specific tests, evaluations, and promotion decisions. These patterns are consistent with underqualified individuals being motivated to put forth more effort, but when judged relative to their peers still struggle to compete. Consistent with these empirical patterns, we find that after conditioning on ability level, individuals who are overqualified are placed in jobs which have lower outside earnings, while the reverse is true for those who are underqualified.


“Price Elasticity of Road Demand – Evidence from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey”
I study the elasticity of road demand with respect to toll increases in the context of the Port Authority's four bridges and two tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey. The agency sets tolls at all six crossings identically based on vehicle type, time of day, and form of payment. The agency also implements its irregular toll increases equally and at the same time for all crossings. I examine monthly traffic levels before and after toll increases first by seasonalizing the long run traffic time series, resulting in little evidence of reactions to toll hikes. To formalize these results, I run an event study to calculate the elasticity of demand. Results show a precisely estimated $0$ effect of toll hikes on usage. In an extension, I find that toll hikes, if anything, decrease traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, which should be a net substitute rather than a complement to Port Authority crossings. The findings imply that toll hikes can be an efficient source of tax revenue since they do not seem to distort behavior. However, it also implies toll hikes are not very effective at regulating traffic and pollution externalities.

WORK IN PROGRESS

How does remote work affect labor market outcomes and decisions? An instrument variable approach

How does implementing remote work affect partial equilibrium labor market decisions and outcomes of workers? There is substantial self-selection into remote work, and prevalence since COVID is heavily influenced by pandemic, policy, and other confounders. To address this, I use the quasi-random timing, location, and magnitude of corporate office lease turnovers, which give firms the opportunity to downsize office space and shift to remote work, as an instrument for remote work adoption among ACS respondents. Preliminary work uses public ACS data and county-level instrument exposure. These results show that allowing remote work leads labor supply to fall by 8.2 hours per week and migration to increase by 15 percentage points. Release of labor and household outcomes based on restricted-access data and refined block-level instrument exposure awaits expanded Census access and disclosure approval.