I study how economic environments and frictions shape human capital investment and preference dynamics, and how these forces aggregate to drive inequality, welfare, and long-run growth. The environments I focus on include technological change, family background, and policy; 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 formation, including time discounting — are endogenous and evolve with the cumulative history of choices, shocks, and constraints, rather than being fixed parameters. As a result, early distortions 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 recover these mechanisms and use them to evaluate policy interventions ex ante.