Job Market Paper
Early Mentors for Exceptional Students
Although we are acquainted anecdotally with extraordinary people like Mozart and Marie Curie, there is little systematic research on how children with exceptional ability develop into truly extraordinary talents. Is the supply of extraordinary talent inelastic, dependent on a rare combination of innate gifts and the availability of mentors who are themselves world-class (Irène Joliot-Curie and her mother Marie)? Or, could the supply be fairly elastic because mentors need only have abilities within the normal range? I analyze these questions in the context of mathematics, where there is a consensus on how exceptional ability presents itself in children. I show that mathematics teachers who organize clubs and competitions can identify and foster exceptional math students, causing them to win honors, attend selective universities, major in STEM fields, and have careers in which they disproportionately spur economic growth. I demonstrate that there are many exceptional math students without mentors who could be reached with modest investments.
Invited Presentations: NBER Economics of Talent
Media Coverage: Marginal Revolution, The Report Card with Nat Malkus
Selected Research in Progress
The Persistence of Early Scientific Interests: Evidence from the Science Talent Search
This paper investigates the impact of early specialization in science on the development of exceptional scientific talent. Using novel data from the Science Talent Search (STS)—a research-based science competition for U.S. high school students—spanning 1943 to 2024, I examine the early scientific interests of 24,300 top science students, including 13 Nobel Prize winners and 20 MacArthur Fellows. The data, drawn from annual STS reports, include student details such as name, age, school, and project description, enabling me to link early scientific interests to later career outcomes, including publications and patents. By exploring these linkages, I aim to understand the factors that contribute to persistence in specific scientific fields. Additionally, by linking pre-1968 cohorts to their parents' 1950 census records, I assess the influence of parental education and occupation on the persistence of scientific interests.
Teacher Shortages and Labor Supply: Evidence from Application Data (with Michael Bates and Andrew C. Johnston)
Rigid salary schedules in public schools may generate a shortage of quality candidates for some openings and a surplus in others. We use novel applicant data from a hiring platform to investigate the supply of teachers to openings in different subjects and school types. Positions in science, mathematics, and low-income schools receive few quality applicants. Applicants are plentiful in early childhood education and suburban schools. We leverage changes in salary schedules to estimate how labor supply responds to salary for each type of opening. We use the estimates to calculate salaries that equalize quality applicants across schools and fields.
The Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program: Impacts on Later-in-Life Math Productivity
Publications
De Finetti Lattices and Magog Triangles (with Andrew Beveridge and Kristin Heysse), The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 2021.
The Voter Basis and the Admissibility of Tree Characters (with Andrew Beveridge), Order: A Journal on the Theory of Ordered Sets and its Applications, 2021.