Research
About Me
I am a macro and labor economist. My dissertation studies the extent and the implications of assortative matching between heterogeneous workers and employers based on observable and unobservable (to the researcher) characteristics. In my job market paper, I use a structural model with multidimensional worker and firm heterogeneity to estimate the shifts in skill demand that changed the US occupational and wage distributions since the 1980s. The model allows me to control for various aspects of the selection of workers into jobs. I then use these estimates to assess theories proposed to account for changes in the US such as international trade and skill-biased technical change. In another completed paper (with Tzuo-Hann Law), I implement non-parametric identification of a state-of-the-art assortative matching model using a large matched employer-employee data set from Germany. This paper offers insight into the increase in and determinants of wage dispersion in Germany. In it, I also construct a test that helps discriminate between structural and regression approaches to studying labor market sorting and implement it using administrative data from Germany.
You can find an abstract of my dissertation research here.
Research Papers:
The Effect of Job-Polarizing Skill Demands on the US Wage Structure
I present a quantitative model which accounts for changes in occupational wages, occupational employment shares, and the overall wage distribution. The model replicates numerous aspects of US cross-sectional data observed across decades from 1979 to 2010, notably job and wage polarization. In the model, changes in production complementarities are crucial but insufficient to replicate the occupational and wage changes observed. The distribution of worker skills, sorting, and the distribution of skill demands also all play important roles in shaping the occupational and wage distributions. I use the model's estimated skill demands to evaluate prominent explanations offered in the literature for changes in skill demands. I find that industry-specific trends, technological progress, and import competition from China account for up to 57% of these changes. I also find that information and communications technology spurred demand for jobs requiring interpersonal and social skills in the 1990s. This development appears far more pivotal in accounting for skill demand changes than the automation of routine jobs concentrated in the manufacturing and construction sectors.
Sorting and Wage Inequality (with Tzuo-Hann Law)
We measure the roles of the permanent component of worker and firm productivities, complementarities between them, search frictions, and equilibrium sorting in driving German wage dispersion. We do this using a standard assortative matching model with on-the-job search. The model is identified and estimated using matched employer-employee data on wages and labor market transitions without imposing parametric restrictions on the production technology. The model's fit to the wage data is comparable to prominent wage regressions with additive worker and firm fixed effects that use many more degrees of freedom. Moreover, we propose a direct test that rejects the restrictions underlying the additive specification. We use the model to decompose the rise in German wage dispersion between the 1990s and the 2000s. We find that changes in the production function and the induced changes in equilibrium sorting patterns account for virtually all the rise in the observed wage dispersion. Search frictions are an important determinant of the level of wage dispersion but have had little impact on its rise over time.
Income Polarization in the United States (with Ali Alichi and Juan Solé)
This paper uses a combination of micro-level datasets to document the rise of income polarization—what some have referred to as the “hollowing out” of the income distribution—in the United States, since the 1970s. While in the initial decades more middle-income households moved up, rather than down, the income ladder, since the turn of the current century, most of polarization has been towards lower incomes. This result is striking and in contrast with findings of other recent contributions. In addition, the paper finds evidence that, after conditioning on income and household characteristics, the marginal propensity to consume from permanent changes in income has somewhat fallen in recent years. We assess the potential impacts of these trends on private consumption. During 1998-2013, the rise in income polarization and lower marginal propensity to consume have suppressed the level of real consumption at the aggregate level, by about 3.5 percent—equivalent to more than one year of consumption.
Other Work:
"HIV and Risky Sexual Behavior: Evaluating the Equilibrium Impact of ART and PrEP" (with Kurt Mitman)
"Testing Applications of the Two-Way Fixed Effects Model" (with Tzuo-Hann Law and Tobin Hanspal)
"Evaluating the Local Impact of Criminal Justice Reforms"