My research is in applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on labour, health and inequality. I use causal inference methods and large-scale survey, administrative and historical data to study how work, institutions and public policy shape health, wellbeing and labour-market outcomes.
My current research spans four connected areas: labour and job quality; health and public policy; gender and labour markets; and empirical methods and reproducibility.
Revise & Resubmit, Labour Economics
Does the meaning we derive from work shape what happens when work is taken away? Using the UK furlough scheme, I find that furlough temporarily reduced the health gap between workers in occupations with high and low perceived social significance.
Under Review, Journal of Development Economics
I exploit the expansion of full-day secondary schooling in Peru to study how the availability of longer school days for adolescents affects maternal employment. A 10 percentage point increase in availability increases maternal employment by around 1 percentage point.
with Jaimie Bleck, Jacopo Bonan, Philippe LeMay-Boucher, and Bassirou Sarr
Under Review, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Using a field experiment with informal social associations (grins) in urban Mali, we examine whether their cooperative advantage persists when members are separated from their existing groups. Grins cooperate more successfully than other groups, but this advantage largely disappears when their members interact with strangers, suggesting that cooperation is embedded in existing social relationships rather than association membership itself.
Nature, 2026
with Abel Brodeur, Damian Mikola, Nathaniel Cook, and others
A large-scale assessment of the computational reproducibility and robustness of recent research in economics and political science. Across 110 studies, we examine whether published results can be computationally reproduced and whether their substantive conclusions survive reasonable alternative analytical choices.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2026
with Abel Brodeur, David Valenta, Alexandru Marcoci, and others
We compare human researchers, AI-assisted research teams and fully AI-led approaches to assessing the reproducibility of quantitative social-science research.
with Tim Ölkers, Ritika Sethi and Manali Sovani
Canadian Journal of Economics, 2025
We examine the reproducibility and replicability of evidence linking pre-colonial warfare to long-run development in India, considering alternative measures of historical conflict exposure.
I examine whether organisational integration within the NHS affected socioeconomic inequalities in healthcare use, exploiting the 1974 NHS reorganisation.
with Eoin McLaughlin
We study the long-run consequences of childhood tonsillectomy, combining historical variation in access to tonsillectomy with longitudinal data to examine effects on later-life health and human capital.
Funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust