Peer-Reviewed Publications
"Female Labor Supply and Rural Pension Eligibility in Brazil," with Gaurav Khanna, Stephanie Lee, and Benjamin Thompson. Journal of Public Economics, 245 105352, 2025.
"Are informal transfers driven by strategic risk-sharing or fairness? Evidence from an experiment in Kenya" (with Prachi Jain), in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 191, 2021, pp. 186-196
"Recent trends in wealth inequality among older Americans in two surveys," with Gabor Kezdi and David Weir, in Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, Vol. 45, Iss.3-4, Dec. 2020, pp. 215-236.
"Pension Regulation, Firm Borrowing, and Investment Risk," in Journal of Risk and Insurance, Vol. 87, No. 4, Nov. 2020, pp. 935-968.
"The Consequences of the 1959-1961 Chinese Famine for Educational Attainment," with Johannes Norling, in The BE Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, Vol. 20, Iss. 2, Feb. 2020, pp. 1-23.
"Pension Contributions, Pension Awareness, and Changing Personal Finances," in Contemporary Economic Policy, Vol. 37, Iss. 4. Oct. 2019, pp. 673-693.
"Economic Development and Gender Inequality in Cognition: a comparison of China and India, and of SAGE and the HRS Sister Studies," with David Weir and Kenneth Langa, in The Journal of the Economics of Ageing. Vol(4) Dec. 2014, pp. 114-125
"On the Minimum Semi-Definite Rank of a Simple Graph," with M. Booth, P. Hackney, B. Harris, C.R. Johnson, S. Narayan, T. Lenker, L. Mitchell, A. Pascoe, B.D. Sutton, in Linear and Multilinear Algebra 59 (2011), 483-506
"Linearly independent vertices and minimum semi-definite rank," with P. Hackney, B. Harris, S.Narayan, L. Mitchell, and A. Pascoe, in Linear Algebra and its Applications 431 (2009), 1105-1115
"On the Minimum Rank Among Positive Semi-Definite Matrices with a Given Graph," with M. Booth, P. Hackney, B. Harris, C.R. Johnson, L. Mitchell, S. Narayan, A. Pascoe, K. Steinmetz, B.D. Sutton, W. Wang, in Siam Journal of Matrix Analysis and Applications, 30(2008), 731-740.
Working Papers
"Pension Eligibility Criteria in a Setting with Informality," with Carla Moreno.
"Fertility and Labor Supply in the Time of Zika," with C. Austin Davis, Maddison Erbabian, and Gaurav Khanna.
Other publications
"Can Trade Policy Support the next Global Climate Agreement?” Carnegie Paper, No. 96 (2008)
Research in progress
"Social security and retirement reform in Brazil," with C. Austin Davis and Ben Thompson
"Pension Obligations and Other Corporate Debt," with Michelle Zemel
Working papers on pause
"Employer Suspensions of 401(k) Contributions Over Recessions"
This paper uses regulatory data from the Department of Labor Form 5500 to develop comprehensive measures of how firms offering defined contribution pension adjust employer contributions to retirement plans over time. The preferred specification suggests that employers suspended contributions to over 5% of stable 401(k) plans, accounting for 3.8% of covered employees, during the 2001-2002 recession. Employers suspended contributions to almost 40% of stable 401(k) plans, accounting for 8% of covered employees, during the 2007-2009 recession. In both recessions, the employer match is reinstated for 65% of these employees within three years of the peak of employer suspensions. This reinstatement process was slower following 2003 suspensions than it was following 2009 suspensions: 20% fewer employers who lost their employer contribution in 2003 recovered it in the following year than employees who lost their employer contribution in 2009. The measurements developed in this paper identify almost twice as many participants affected by employer suspensions as previous studies relying on surveys of employers and news announcements.
Defined benefit pensions, leverage ratios, and investment risk in the Great Recession"
Dramatic losses in pension value between 2007 and 2009 led to high required pension payments for defined benefit firms. A general concern was that those payments prevented firms from making productive investments to assist economic recovery. This paper suggests, instead, that pension losses allowed firms to borrow from their pensioners, and tight credit prevented them from taking on sub-optimally high leverage ratios and investment risk that are usually motivated by costly pensions. Indeed, firms making minimum required contributions before 2007 borrowed 4.6 percentage points more and faced default premiums that were 22 percent higher than their counterparts with less costly pensions. This wedge disappeared during the Great Recession.