Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
Snavely Fund Prize for Outstanding Dissertation Proposal; Snavely Fund Prize for Outstanding Second Year Paper
Invited Presentations: Congressional Budget Office, National Tax Association
I study the impact of the 2018 U.S. steel tariffs on bidding in highway procurement auctions. The requirement to use domestically produced steel did not insulate procurement spending from the effects of tariffs in import-reliant coastal states. I find that bids on steel inputs saw a significant increase in these states but were unaffected in the Midwest, where most domestic steel is produced. Using a structural model of bidding and entry, I show that bidders in California faced higher costs but also earned higher markups as fewer bidders participated in steel-intensive projects. I estimate that California incurred an additional $100 million (a 6.8% increase) to construct highway projects, with one-third of the increase driven by the decline in competition. These effects are absent in Michigan.
Publications
What is the role of trade policy in promoting intra-Empire trade? We address the question in the context of interwar India, whose trade policies have been accused of harming British export interests. We quantify the impact of trade policy on the value and composition of Indian imports, using novel disaggregated data on both trade policies and imports for 114 commodity categories coming from 42 countries. We find that, even though Indian protection lowered total imports, it substantially boosted imports from the United Kingdom. Despite the rising tariff barriers facing British exporters, trade diversion from other countries ensured that Indian trade policy benefited them overall.
Working Papers
We study the strategic procurement and diversion of prescription opioids to illicit users by pharmacies using granular data on wholesale purchases. The government outsources monitoring for diversion to intermediary drug distributors. However, distributors cannot observe rival distributors’ sales, incentivizing pharmacies engaged in diversion to contract with multiple distributors to avoid detection. Leveraging the introduction of an abuse-deterrent reformulation of OxyContin as a negative demand shock to the illicit market, we estimate that at least 24% of the OxyContin procured by multi-homing pharmacies was diverted to illicit users. Our findings highlight the risks of delegating monitoring to intermediaries with incomplete information.