Select Publications:

• • "I am Jane. Do I pay more in the housing market?" Economic Bulletin (2019)

    • https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-19-00346.html

Breakfast of Champions, Universal Free Breakfast and Conflict in Texas Schools

Job Market Paper. UFB PDF

This paper investigates the relationship between student test scores and conflict outcomes in Texas public schools and whether or not schools participated in the Universal Free Breakfast Program (UFB). Eating a routine breakfast leads to increased physical and mental performance, as well as test scores. Surprisingly, there has been little focuses on how eating a routine breakfast affects behavior, such as violence, truancy, and classroom disruptions at school. I compile a panel data set from two administrative sources in Texas, spanning years 2009-2017. Using fixed effects models, I find that schools that offer UFB do indeed have higher test scores and also have reduced conflict outcomes such as fights, substance abuse, and truancy, at all levels of schooling. Using quantile regressions I compare the magnitude of the total effect between schools with low and high preexisting conflict reports, and show that higher conflict schools do receive a great benefit from taking part in UFB. These results suggest that the benefit schools receive from taking part in the UFB help their students achieve better potential outcomes in both schooling, behavior, and general well being.

Fracking and Tracking: The Effects of Underground Injection Control Wells have on the housing market.

Fracking PDF

The technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking", has made it possible to produce vast new quantities of oil and natural gas. States like Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma have seen a dramatic increase in the number of wells for both oil and natural gas. In this study, the main source of exogenous variation to be explored is the location of injection well sites. With that I estimate the effect hydraulically fractured natural gas and oil injection sites have on both urban and rural residential home prices between years 2000 to 2018 in 9 different states. The data is coming from two rich data sets, one form the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that listed all oil and natural gas wells. The second comes from Zillow's ZTRAX data base and that contains home transaction and administrative data. ArcGis is used to combine the data and created varying buffer zones sizes around injection well sites to see how average home prices and the average number of transactions changed before and after a well is put in, and as distance from the well site increases. Both ordinary least squares (OLS) with fixed effects, a spatial differences in differences, and unconditional quantile regressions are used. Self selection bias is solved through the use of the spatial difference in difference. My results show that homes that are within .5 mile of a well have a $3.7% increase in selling price, as well as a $3.3% increase in price per square foot.

Is the Housing Market getting High: Recreational Marijuana Legalization and its affects on Local Housing Markets (with Donggeun Kim and Sean O’Connor)

Despite federal law, a number of states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Using a national housing data set from Zillow.com, we identify the cross and inter-state effect of marijuana legalization on the housing price distribution. Across states we find large positive effects in the bottom half of the distribution following the success of a vote to legalize and in the top half following the opening of dispensaries which provide a legal means of buying marijuana. Within Colorado, the introduction of dispensaries to a neighborhood similarly results in the appreciation of nearby home values. Considered together, this research suggests that there are second order benefits associated with marijuana legalization that policy makers and voters should be aware of when deciding the drug's legal status.

In Progress:

Flat Rate Tuition and Student Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the University of Oklahoma (with Gregory Burge)