Thesis Research and Three Volume Monograph

My updated Ph.D. thesis, Essays on the Economics of Learning and Distribution Under Animus and Oligopoly Conditions, completed at the University of Delaware Alfred Lerner School of Business and Economics and School of Education, presents three interlinked essays that develop novel theoretical and empirical frameworks for understanding persistent inequality, epistemic injustice, and policy design under uncertainty. Unifying the essays is a formal critique of the welfare theorems under behavioral realism: treating preferences as endogenous, beliefs as mutable through Bayesian updating and animus-distorted monitoring, and institutions as both constraints and levers of justice. Across each essay, I model how competitive equilibria generically fail to ensure social survival and basic capabilities for marginalized workers, and how social policy decisions made using endogenous, deprivation-weighted welfare functions achieve superior equity and productivity outcomes by internalizing the epistemic and material costs that market prices systematically omit.

The first essay, Delaware's Desegregation, School Choice, and Dynamic Complementarity Policies Under Disequilibrium, develops a Brundage-Tavani overlapping generations model with Loury borrowing constraints, Bayesian teacher tracking, and Hornbeck-Logan surplus accounting to analyze how STEM school finance reforms and desegregation policy shape intergenerational mobility in Delaware. It proves a gap-narrowing and surplus improvement theorem under dynamic complementarity, establishes the global asymptotic stability of the Ally planner under Routh-Hurwitz conditions, and applies a unified identification strategy combining doubly robust Bayesian difference-in-differences with synthetic controls, LASSO variable selection, Kitagawa decomposition, and Andrews-Mikusheva partial identification geometry to estimate effects on income rank, income by quantile, poverty incidence, and non-cognitive skills. Findings confirm that advanced mathematics credits raise income percentile rank by 3.73 to 3.74 points with returns increasing monotonically up the income distribution.

The second essay, Geometric Identification of Non-Linear Darity-Holder Double Gaps Using Bayesian Inference, builds a belief-dependent Loury OLG with epistemic wedges and assortative mating to prove that dynasties differentiated only by epistemic priors develop persistent and self-widening income gaps, then constructs a novel epistemic double gap estimator that embeds the Cotton-Darity decomposition and Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder framework as linear functionals of a curvature-constrained moment projection nesting the Athey-Imbens changes-in-changes model as a zero-curvature special case. Using NLSY97 data, it finds that non-white women face a 25.60 percent unexplained wage differential and non-white graduates face 15.48 percent, decomposed into Cotton in-group benefit and out-group cost components and augmented by a Camparo vector-space Likert treatment of psychological capital.

The third essay, Myopic Losses to Welfare Under Patriarchal Constraints: Capability-Expanding Spending on Girls and Women in Disequilibrium Cone Economies, introduces a feminist mathematical economics mechanism on McKenzie cone Knightian uncertainty induced disequilibrium economies of capability formation in which girls and women face three interlocking constraints: epistemic animus that garbles the in formation they receive about their own abilities, patriarchal feasibility that shrinks the set of plans they can execute, and care obligations that tax their time and cognitive bandwidth. The Homo sapiens worker in the model evaluates capabilities through an S-shaped, non-smooth, reference-dependent utility whose kink sits at a biophysical basic-needs threshold, and she plans with Brown–Lewis myopia whose horizon collapses as she approaches that threshold. 

Sen-Loury altruistic parents invest in the capabilities of daughters whose abilities are correlated with their own, and I prove that correlated ability converts a one-generation information distortion into an inherited belief bias amplified by the factor 1/(1−ρw). Animus lowers capability investment, lowers labor supply elasticities, and deepens monopsony markdowns. Inside marriage, a gendered wedge in home production generates Roemerian exploitation, and I prove the existence of a critical exploitative share ω∗ beyond which the von Neumann cone admits no viable balanced growth. 

Capability-expanding spending on girls raises intertemporal marginal propensities to consume at every lag and raises Kantian provision of needs critical public goods for every identity group. I derive a universal income mechanism with an exact necessary and sufficient condition under which it dominates means tested transfers, and I prove that an individually paid demogrant financed by a profit tax raises output at every date, raises women’s fallback positions, and lowers the ex ploitative share. The policy section proves that childcare, transport, pay transparency, and collective bargaining are complements. 

This paper previews an upcoming monograph entitled Democratized Sustainable Credible Planning Under Uncertainty: Chichilnisky Basic Needs-Based Intertemporal Collective Choice Under Williamsonian Classical Conditions. The paper takes the monograph's core machinery and rebuilds each piece with girls, women, and care at the center. That machinery includes the needs-first welfare criterion motivated by Chichilnisky's impossibility results, the Homo sapiens worker whose S-shaped threshold utility and collapsing bandwidth produce Brown–Lewis myopia, learning under scarcity, Loury dynasties with correlated ability, the von Neumann production cone, and the intertemporal Keynesian, Kaleckian and Leontief–Kaleckian multipliers. 

The paper adds patriarchal limits on what women can feasibly do, animus that distorts the signals girls get about their own ability, and a gendered wedge in household care work, and then previews the monograph's credible-planning conclusions as compact proofs: inherited pessimism amplified by 1/(1−ρw), deeper monopsony wage cuts, a critical share ω* of exploitative marriages beyond which balanced growth fails, and output-raising remedies in girls-first spending, Kantian solidarity, a universal income financed by a profit tax, and complementary childcare, transport, pay transparency and collective bargaining. 

The two-part manuscript below develops a complete micro-to-macro theory of production, distribution, and cooperative planning under Knightian uncertainty. Together the three volumes resolve long-standing dilemmas in behavioral public finance, welfare measurement, and institutional design by embedding a formally specified, biologically grounded agent into both a shadow price framework and uncertainty-induced general disequilibrium cone economies. The Homo sapiens worker, whose decisions are shaped by survival-threshold utility, cognitive bandwidth limits, and behavioral inertia, simultaneously explains the empirical anomalies of poverty economics, the structural instability of decentralized private accumulation, and the welfare superiority of cooperative institutions. The joint result is an empirically grounded research programme linking individual decision theory to macroeconomic mechanics and democratic institutional design.

Scarcity Induced Cognition and (Ir)rational Poverty-Induced Decisions constructs the behavioral microfoundations. It proves that five canonical anomalies among low-income households, including lottery demand, tax over-withholding, political disengagement, college under-matching, and classroom learning compression, are welfare-maximizing responses to structural scarcity rather than failures of judgment, unifying S-shaped VNM utility over a caloric survival threshold, Brown-Lewis planning-horizon collapse, Gabaix sparse cognition, and Jones behavioral inertia into a single framework. It then corrects the Dreze-Stern shadow price apparatus to internalize the cascade-interruption, intelligence-production, and human-capital returns that standard cost-benefit analysis omits, showing that welfare weights are maximized at the threshold and that institutional defaults are themselves distributional policy instruments.

Profit, Uncertainty, and Socialized Credible Economic Decisions embeds these microfoundations into a Von Neumann-Iwai production economy under Beissner-Riedel Knight-Walras equilibrium. It proves that non-cooperative behavior under Knightian uncertainty generates endogenous Li-Yorke chaos and superlinear aggregate output losses amplified through the Baqaee-Farhi production network, that the absence of a survival floor is sufficient for protocol-universal labor supply collapse, formally rendering Sen's entitlement failure theorem a special case of HACC viability kernel emptiness, and that democratic socialized investment is topology-restoring, converting the chaotic private accumulation map into a contraction and satisfying the necessary conditions for democratic collective rationality.

Job Market Paper Research and Presentation 

Andrews Learning-by-Doing Persistent Animus, AI Displacement, and Mass Incarceration: Dynamics of Dreadful Social Arithmetic (Submission to The Review of Black Political Economy)

Public Allies Service Term Research Output