Postdoctoral Scholar
Welcome to my webpage!
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago's Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA), part of the Development Innovation Lab (DIL). I obtained my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Western Ontario in 2024. I am primarily interested in Empirical Industrial Organization and Environmental/Energy Economics.
In my work, I strive to understand how markets respond to policies aimed at reducing emissions and various challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change. I have studied the role of fuel substitution as part of firms' cost of abatement, carbon leakage, and the organization of pipeline networks.
In September 2025, I will join the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne as an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer).
Research Interests
Empirical Industrial Organization
Production function estimation
Firm dynamics
Energy and Environmental Economics
Energy efficiency and fuel substitution
Pipelines infrastructure
Applied Econometrics
Education
Ph.D. in Economics - University of Western Ontario
MA in Economics - Carleton University
Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Political Science - Université de Montréal
Languages
English (fluent)
French (native)
Research Report
Job market paper
Lasserre-Renzetti Prize for Best Student Paper — 2023 Canadian Resource and Environmental Economics Association Conference (CREEA)
Graduate Student Paper Award (runner-up), Bank of Canada, 2023
Presented at Society of Economic Dynamics (SED, 2024 Barcelona) University of Toronto (2024), University of Melbourne (2024), University of Virginia (2024), University of Stavanger (2024), King's University College (2023, London Ontario), the 2023 Canadian Resource and Environmental Economics Association Conference (CREEA, Ottawa), the 2023 EEA-ESEM Congress (Barcelona), the 2023 European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE, Rome), the 57th Annual Conference of the Canadian Economics Association (Winnipeg), UM-UWO-MSU Labo(u)r Day (2023, East Lansing), the 21st Annual International Industrial Organization Conference (IIOC 2023, Washington DC), Young Economist Symposium (2022, Yale University), the 56th Annual Canadian Economics Association Meetings (2022, Ottawa), and the 17th CIREQ PhD Students' Conference (2022, Montreal).
The economic cost of carbon pricing depends on the ability and incentives of firms to switch towards cleaner fuels. Yet, many fundamental economic forces that drive firms' decisions to use different fuels are unobserved, causing significant uncertainty over the effectiveness of carbon policies. In this paper, I propose a new dynamic production model with multidimensional unobserved heterogeneity that underly technology differences and captures how firms' fuel choices respond to price changes. These differences cause heterogeneity in abatement costs, which generates heterogeneous responses to carbon pricing. Leveraging minimal assumptions about optimal input choice and the technology frontier, I quantify the model from a detailed panel of Indian steel establishments. Based on these estimates, implementing a carbon tax equivalent to 2,000 INR/ton (25 USD/ton) of carbon dioxide equivalent leads to a 70% reduction in emissions. But only 18% of this reduction comes from fuel-switching within existing firms. I find that the larger reductions come from reallocation of output across firms (58%) and costly reduction in aggregate output (24%). Substantial heterogeneity in the fuel efficiency of existing furnaces coupled with the limited geographical reach of natural gas pipelines towards high-emission firms explains the prevalence of output reallocation relative to fuel switching.
Revise and Resubmit — Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
New Draft (June 2025)!
Winner of summer paper prize - Western Economics department
Presented at the 55th Annual Canadian Economics Association Meetings (2021, remote)
This paper studies how plants reorganize their production when faced with asymmetric carbon pricing. When plants compete across areas, asymmetric regulation can lead to carbon leakage, shifting emissions from regulated to unregulated areas. I build a production model with multiple fuel inputs, imperfect competition, and region-specific carbon taxes. Using publicly available Canadian plant-level data on a wide range of air pollutants, I invert the chemical reactions from combustion to back out plants' fuel usage. I then estimate the model by exploiting variation in the British Columbia (B.C.) and Quebec carbon taxes implemented in 2008 and 2007, respectively. Findings indicate substantial emissions reductions in British Columbia, with 95% confidence intervals ranging from 18% to 45%, and 4% reductions in Quebec. Contrary to theoretical predictions of carbon leakage, the analysis reveals no statistically significant shift in production towards unregulated provinces. A detailed decomposition highlights that the absence of leakage was primarily due to regulated plants' ability to absorb the tax by switching from oil to natural gas and due to aggregate price increases, which suppressed overall consumer demand and inhibited the ability of unregulated plants to increase output.
Joint with Yanyou Chen and Adam Wyonzek
Presented at the 2024 Canadian Economic Association Conference (CEA, Toronto), Western University, Department of Economics (2023, Brown Bag),
Joint with Costas Arkolakis and Cheolhwan Kim
This research uses the method developed by Huang and Salmon (2004) to estimate market herding dynamics in a CAPM framework, exploiting time variation in betas and cross-sectional dispersion of individual assets. Their model is adapted to the cryptocurrency market in order to shed some light on the recent surge in prices and volatility. Using high-frequency data at 5-minute intervals, I find significant evidence of increasing market herding over the high volatility period between August 2017 and March 2018.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26154.11204