Tastes in the United States: Convergence or Divergence?

This study investigates how tastes for consumption goods across the United States have changed in recent decades. Using Nielsen Homescan Consumer Panel data for over 77 million transactions at the Universal Product Code (UPC) level, I find evidence of divergence in food tastes across regional markets from 2007-2016 and across households of different income, education, and race groups. Non-Hispanic blacks and whites exhibit divergence in tastes for every broad food category studied. Urban/rural groups and other race groups do not show an overall change in taste differences between each other, while the tastes of rural households across regions are unique in their apparent convergence. Overall, ideological differences measured by "political distance," explain changing taste differences better than geographical distance.

Quality Choice in Information-Intensive Goods: The Significance of Education and Income (with Volodymyr Lugovskyy, Emerson Melo, and Alexandre Skiba) 

Analyzing differences in the quality of information-intensive goods may require information processing from consumers. Focusing on the differences between organic and conventional milk, we propose analyzing such markets using a tractable micro-founded discrete choice framework with Rational Inattention, non-homothetic preferences, and heterogeneous consumers. We predict theoretically and confirm empirically that consumers with higher efficiency of information processing (EIP) choose higher quality goods than those with lower EIP; however, this does not hold for poorer consumers for whom budget constraints are binding. Similarly, choosing higher quality increases with income, but the effect is weak without sufficiently high EIP.

Risk Aversion in Lending Following the Financial Crisis

Following the 2007-2008 financial crisis, bank lending dropped dramatically, and the decline persisted well into the recovery period. This paper attempts to explain the drop in lending using a consumer default model with risk-aversion in loan pricing. The version of the model with risk-aversion is compared to one that uses the standard assumption of risk-neutral financial intermediaries to see if a model with risk-aversion more accurately predicts lending in the post-crisis period. The risk-averse pricing model consistently generates more accurate interest rates than the risk-neutral pricing model, while the risk-neutral pricing model more accurately predicts the debt-output ratio.

China’s Tax Burden and Provincial Economic Growth 

This study estimates the causal effect of the tax burden on economic growth at the provincial level in China from 1995-2014 using a panel data vector autoregressive (VAR) model and testing for Granger causality. I first estimate the overall effect of taxes on economic growth, then I disaggregate the data to determine the differential effects of specific taxes that are the largest sources of budgetary tax revenue. I find that the business, enterprise, and individual income taxes Granger-cause lower provincial-level economic growth, while greater reliance on the value-added tax (VAT) is associated with higher provincial-level economic growth. These results provide evidence in support of the Chinese government's decision to replace the business tax with the VAT beginning in 2016 and of potential benefits for local government officials whose advancement is dependent on tax base expansion and tax revenue increases while maintaining high local economic performance.  

Indiana University

• ‘Intermediate Microeconomics’

• ‘Introduction to Microeconomics’ (Online)

• ‘Introduction to Macroeconomics’

• ‘Statistical Analysis for Business and Economics’

University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA)

• ‘Economics of Development’