My research spans three interconnected themes:
I. Human Capital, Addiction, Health, and Crime
II. Human Capital, AI, Technological Change, and Labor Markets
III. Aggregate Implications for Inequality, Growth, and Welfare
The unifying thread of my research is the endogenous development of human capital and preferences, and their implications for inequality, welfare, and growth.
I study how economic environments and frictions shape human capital investment and preference formation, and how these forces aggregate to determine inequality, welfare, and long-run growth. The environments I examine include technological change, family background, and public policy, while the frictions include credit constraints, adjustment costs, information imperfections, and uncertainty.
A central focus of my work is that key propagation mechanisms — human capital development and preference dynamics, including the evolution of time discounting — are endogenous. They evolve with the cumulative history of choices, shocks, and constraints, rather than being fixed parameters. As a result, early distortions can compound over the life cycle in ways that static or reduced-form approaches miss.
By integrating causal identification with structural estimation and quantitative equilibrium models, I identify and quantify these mechanisms and use them to evaluate the ex ante effects of policy interventions.
The Causal Effects of Youth Cigarette Addiction and Education (with James J. Heckman). Journal of Political Economy, 2026.
Inequality in Human Capital and Endogenous Credit Constraints (with James J. Heckman). Review of Economic Dynamics, 2017.
Financial Inclusion and Racial Wealth Inequality. Revise and Resubmit, International Economic Review.
Juvenile Crime, Education, and Expungement Policy (with Limor Golan). Work in Progress.
Nature and Nurture in the Production of Childhood BMI (with Nancy Daza Baez, Gabriella Conti, and Fan Wang). Work in Progress.
Food and Physical Activity Environments and Children's Health: Evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study (with Nancy Daza Baez, David Church, Gabriella Conti, and Fan Wang). Submitted.
The Impact of Juvenile Conviction on Human Capital and Labor Market Outcomes (with Limor Golan and Hayley Wabiszewski). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 2022.
Technology, Growth, and Skill Obsolescence (with Joseph Kaboski and Ge Sun). Work in Progress.
The Determinants of Rising Inequality of Health Insurance and Wages. Work in Progress.
On the Welfare Cost of Consumption Fluctuations in the Presence of Memorable Goods (with Dirk Krueger and Andrew Postlewaite). Quantitative Economics, 2020.
The Real Effects of Financial (Dis)integration: A Multi-Country Equilibrium Analysis of Europe (with Indraneel Chakraborty, Hans Holter, and Serhiy Stepanchuk). Journal of Monetary Economics, 2017.
Income Inequality, Tax Policy, and Economic Growth (with Siddhartha Biswas and Indraneel Chakraborty). Economic Journal, 2017.
