Research

“Black-White Disposable Income Inequality: The Rising Importance of  Single Women.” 2025. Forthcoming, International Tax and Public Finance. [Paper]

“Stalled Progress? Five Decades of Black-White and Rural-Urban Income Gaps” (with Bradley Hardy, Shria Holla, and James P. Ziliak). 2025. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. [Paper]

“Income Inequality in the United States, 1975-2021” (with Bradley Hardy and James P. Ziliak). 2024.  Fiscal Studies. [Paper]

“Inequality in the United States: 1975-2021” (with Bradley Hardy, Shria Holla, and James P. Ziliak). 2024. Institute for Fiscal Studies, IFS Deaton Review Country Studies. [Report]

“The Effect of Immediate Postpartum Contraception on Teen Birth Spacing and Infant Health: Evidence from Changes in the Medicaid Payment Structure.” (Job Market Paper). [Draft]

Awarded Horowitz Foundation grant for outstanding social policy research (2025)

I examine the effect of subsidizing contraceptives on birth spacing and infant health among teenage mothers. My analysis exploits state-level changes in the Medicaid payment structure that made long-acting-reversible-contraceptives (LARCs) available to women on Medicaid while still in the hospital for a delivery. I use restricted individual-level birth data from the National Center for Health Statistics combined with primary and secondary sources of state policies to identify treated births at the individual-month-level. Following a two-way fixed effects event study specification, I estimate that the policy reduced the monthly short-interval birth rate among teens by 0.046 births per 1,000 female teens aged 15-19 years about one year after policy enactment. This intent-to-treat estimate corresponds to a 20% reduction from a baseline monthly average of 0.22 births per 1,000 teens. I also find evidence that the policy increased the average interval between births and reduced preterm and low-birth weight births and NICU admission rates.

“The Distribution of Life Cycle Earnings Growth” (with Richard Blundell, Chris Bollinger, Charles Hokayem, and James P. Ziliak)

We use a panel dataset of restricted earnings records from 1981-2023 to study how life cycle earnings growth varies across the distribution. The earnings mobility of workers is closely tied to education attainment, the latter of which has grown secularly over time across birth cohorts of workers, and differentially so by sex and race. Our empirical framework allows for heterogeneity in life cycle age profiles of earnings growth as well as permanent and transitory shocks to earnings levels. We use a quantile estimator to recover the distribution of earnings growth, and evaluate how this varies across birth cohort, education, sex, and race. Because the decision to work differs across these demographic characteristics, we also allow for nonrandom selection into employment.