Working Papers
"Frictional Adjustment to Income Tax Incentives: An Application to the Earned Income Tax Credit" (with Joseph L. Mullins) (Online Appendix) - R&R at Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics
This paper finds that individuals respond to changes in tax incentives by switching jobs, and changing the jobs that they are willing to accept when unemployed. The finding is consistent with a labor market model characterized by hours constraints and search frictions. When matching the evidence, the model indicates substantial differences between the short and long-run responses of single mothers to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The long-run effect on employment, for example, is 7 percentage points larger than in the short-run. The implications are immediate for the measurement of tax incidence and deadweight loss: the welfare effects of the tax are more than double relative to those that can be measured from short-run responses. These findings generate a stark comparison to the commonly used frictionless benchmark.
"Signaling Worker Quality in a Developing Country: Lessons From a Certification Program" (with Leonardo Morales and Diego Salazar)
Media coverage: Revista Semana (in Spanish)
We evaluate the returns to signaling occupation-specific skills using unique administrative data from a nationwide certification program in Colombia. The program certifies skills and issues three certificates: basic, intermediate, and advanced. We use regression discontinuity methods to compare workers' earnings around certificate-assignment thresholds. Signaling advanced occupation-specific skills yields significant returns: 9.7%, on average, within two years of certification. Instead, we find no effects from signaling basic or intermediate occupation-specific skills. Our analysis reveals that the primary mechanism behind the observed income effects associated with the advanced certificate is the ability to signal occupation-specific skills to potential employers.
"What We RANDomly Did Not Learn: Wave Zero of the U.S. Opioid Epidemic" (with Cecilia Diaz-Campo)
Opioid-related deaths have contributed to the recent decline in U.S. life expectancy, yet the period preceding the opioid epidemic remains understudied. This article addresses this gap by leveraging the 1974-1982 RAND Health Insurance Experiment. We document novel facts about the widespread use of prescribed opioids, prescriber characteristics, and diagnoses linked to opioid prescriptions in Wave Zero. Additionally, we exploit random assignment to health insurance plans to estimate how opioid use adjusts to changes in plan generosity. More generous plans increase use by raising outpatient visits and providers’ likelihood of prescribing opioids. We discuss implications for understanding the onset of the opioid epidemic.
Research in Progress
"Estimating Substitution Patterns Between Crimes" (with Steven Durlauf, Salvador Navarro, and David Rivers).
"The Effects of Drug Use on Schooling and Crime" (with Diego Salazar).
"The Role of Health Insurance Generosity and Doctor Prescription Behavior on Opioid Painkiller Use and Addiction" (with Cecilia Diaz-Campo).
"Information and Discrimination: The Case of Criminal Records" (with Shiyun Zhang).
Published Papers
"Rehabilitating Futures: Assessing the Effects of Correctional Employment-Focused Programs on Recidivism and Employment", European Economic Review, 173, 2025.
"A Search Model of Early Employment Careers and Youth Crime," International Economic Review, 63(1), 2022.
"Do Psychopathic Traits Predict Criminal Activity?", Journal of Applied Economics, 25(1), 2022 (with Tarek Attia).
"Separating State Dependence, Experience, and Heterogeneity in a Model of Youth Crime and Education," Economics of Education Review, 54, 2016 (with Salvador Navarro and David Rivers)