Working Papers

Spatial Allocation of Workers and Immigration (2024) with Jan Auerbach, Elisa Keller, and Rish Singhania 

Immigrants increase aggregate productivity by overcoming the birth-state bias of US-born workers. The better spatial allocation of immigrants implies that a 1 percentage point increase in immigration raises aggregate productivity by 0.2%, with the gains particularly marked at both ends of the schooling distribution.

Quantifying the Effect of Corporate Taxes on the Life Cycle of Firms (2021) with Rish Singhania 

Studies the role of corporate tax cuts in the decline of average firm size conditional on firm age.


Publications

From Population Growth to Firm Demographics (2022) with Hugo Hopenhayn and Rish Singhania. Econometrica                                                                                                                                                                                               

The baby boom provides a unified quantitative explanation for a set of apparently disparate long-term trends, such as the rise in concentration, the fall of the labor share, and the decline of entrepreneurship.

The Role of Corporate Taxes in the Decline of the Startup Rate (2022) with Rish Singhania. Economic Inquiry                                                                                                                                                               

While a decline in corporate taxes can generate a decline in the startup rate, it is unlikely that this decline played a major role.

Optimal Taxation with Risky Human Capital (2019) with Marek Kapička. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 

Schooling expenditures should be highly subsidized - due to their inherent fiscal externality - but less than fully - due to moral hazard disincentives on learning effort.


Bankruptcy and Cross-Country Differences in Productivity (2019). Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Better bankruptcy laws raise aggregate productivity by allowing lenders to lend more and to more productive firms.

Nelder-Mead Simplex Minimization Routine for Large-Scale Problems: A Distributed Memory Implementation (2014) with Kyle Klein.  Computational Economics

Proposes an implementation of the Nelder-Mead optimization routine for supercomputers. 


Work in Progress

Firm Dynamics With Many Sectors (with Hugo Hopenhayn and Rish Singhania) 

The Shakeout (with Hugo Hopenhayn and Rish Singhania)

Firm and Establishment Dynamics (with Connor Powell) - Slides