Job Market Paper: Industrial Policy and Short-Run Distributional Effects
Studies how an efficiency-improving industrial policy — subsidizing high-externality sectors and taxing low-externality sectors — generates unequal welfare effects across U.S. commuting zones before labor can reallocate. Derives a closed-form formula for short-run, group-level welfare changes and shows that about 60% of commuting zones gain immediately while 40% lose, with gains concentrated in manufacturing-intensive regions east of the Great Plains.
Working Paper: Export Taxes and Cross-Sector Spillovers
Characterizes the optimal export tax when a government can tax exports in only one sector rather than all sectors, using a Roy model of imperfect cross-sector labor mobility. Shows that the constrained-optimal tax deviates from the standard inverse-elasticity benchmark due to general-equilibrium spillovers across sectors that depend on labor mobility, and the tax can become an export subsidy when spillovers are sufficiently strong.
Working Paper: Markup Distortions and Optimal Non-Discriminatory Industrial Policy (with Marc Melitz, Gianmarco Ottaviano, and Davide Suverato)
Characterizes when a non-discriminatory (firm-independent) industrial policy can implement the first-best allocation under monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms and variable demand elasticity. Shows that a first-best policy exists if and only if demand belongs to the Bulow–Pfleiderer class, and that implementation outside the CES case requires a per-unit subsidy. Further shows that this optimal subsidy can be identified from a simple sufficient statistic — the cross-sectional variance of markups — without estimating the full set of structural parameters.
Work in Progress: Distributional Gains from International Trade
Develops a sufficient-statistics framework to measure how gains from trade vary across income groups in a multi-sector model with heterogeneous consumption patterns. Applies the framework to U.S. data (World Input-Output Database and Consumer Expenditure Survey).