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.
"What We RANDomly Did Not Learn: Wave Zero of the U.S. Opioid Epidemic" (with Cecilia Diaz-Campo) - submitted
This article studies the period preceding the current opioid epidemic 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 what we refer to as Wave Zero. Additionally, we exploit random assignment to health insurance plans to estimate how opioid use adjusts to differences in insurance generosity. We find that more generous plans increase use by raising outpatient visits and providers' likelihood of prescribing opioids, without changes in filling rates.
"A Dynamic Factor Model of Skill Formation and Mental Health: Counterfactual Analysis of Interventions for Social Mobility" (with Cecilia Diaz-Campo and Salvador Navarro) - submitted
This paper develops a dynamic latent factor framework to characterize the joint evolution of latent individual skills and outcomes under treatment and selection. We then specialize this framework to analyze mental health trajectories among justice-involved youth, focusing on the distributional impacts of incarceration. Leveraging rich longitudinal data from the Pathways to Desistance study, we recover the joint distribution of latent cognitive skills and mental health, estimate heterogeneous causal effects, and study how incarceration reshapes both levels and relative ranks within the mental health distribution. This approach provides a comprehensive distributional counterfactual analysis of incarceration’s long-run effects.
"Signaling Worker Quality in a Developing Country: Lessons From a Certification Program" (with Leonardo Morales and Diego Salazar) - submitted
Media coverage: Revista Semana (in Spanish)
We estimate the returns of signaling task-specific skills for experienced workers using unique administrative data from a nationwide certification program in Colombia. The program certifies skills and issues one of three certificates: basic, intermediate, and advanced. We use regression discontinuity methods to compare workers' earnings around certificate-assignment thresholds. Signaling advanced task-specific skills yields significant returns: 6.5%, on average, within two years of certification. However, we find no statistically significant effects from signaling basic or intermediate task-specific skills. Our analysis suggests that the advanced certificate works primarily by allowing individuals in formal employment relationships to credibly signal their skills to prospective employers.
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).
"Information and Discrimination: The Case of Criminal Records" (with Shiyun Zhang).
"Pricing Pain: The Behavioral and Fiscal Impact of Opioid Taxes" (with Cecilia Diaz-Campo).
"The Role of Health Insurance Generosity and Doctor Prescription Behavior on Opioid Painkiller Use and Addiction" (with Cecilia Diaz-Campo).
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)