Working Papers
Abstract: This paper investigates the causal effect of election to political office on the employment outcomes of politicians' networks using a close-elections regression discontinuity design applied to United States gubernatorial and congressional races from 1850 to 1930. Using a combination of fuzzy matching, hand matching, and a prediction algorithm, I construct a novel dataset linking election returns to full-count U.S. Census records, allowing me to trace the children and childhood neighbors of candidates over time. I find that the children of winners experience between an 18 to 28 log point increase in occupational earnings in the nearest post-election Census but that these effects fade by the second. Children who are college age at election are also more likely to report being in school, though these effect are not present for other cohorts. In contrast, childhood neighbors—who represent weaker, proximity-based ties—are approximately 2 percentage points more likely to be employed in the public-sector and particularly in the postal service and local government but experience a very modest increase in occupational earnings. I then argue that these results suggest that political access likely confers temporary social advantages that operate through networks rather than through a pure income effect or changes to occupational preferences but that the channels through which they operate vary greatly with relationship type. This paper provides new evidence on the persistence of political advantages over time and uncovers how the mechanisms linking political access to employment outcomes differ between strong and weak ties.
Works in Progress
The Impact of Housing Wealth on the Riskiness of College Major Choice
Abstract: This paper examines how exogenous shocks to family housing wealth influence the riskiness of children’s college major choices. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) linked with the Freddie Mac Housing Price Index, the study constructs a measure of housing wealth change in the four years prior to college entry and relates it to the variance in expected earnings across college majors, a proxy for major “risk.” The results show that a one standard deviation increase in housing wealth, or about $63,000, raises the riskiness of chosen majors by 0.078 to 0.10 standard deviations. The findings are robust to controls for ability, home price in 1997, and various fixed effects. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the effect is stronger among lower-SES households and female respondents. Mechanism tests suggest that the results are better explained by an informal insurance channel—where wealthier or more supportive parents shield children from potential losses—than by changes in intrinsic risk tolerance. Overall, the study provides causal evidence that short-run increases in family wealth lead to riskier educational choices, with implications for socioeconomic mobility and the intergenerational transmission of inequality.
Sibling Spillovers in Education: Evidence from the G.I. Bill and World War II