Hi and thanks for visiting my website!
I'm an applied micreconomist with broad interests that span political economics, labor economics, and public economics. Most of my work aims to understand the real-world consequences of political polarization, and particularly how it effects the performance and quality of government (after all, the definition of democracy is that the government isn't separable from politics). But my research also crosses into other areas of labor economics, the economics of crime, and development economics.
My most controversial opinion is that St. Louis is a cool city, I know more about the history of Swedish death metal than about most other topics, and my kids are cuter and more fun than any economics paper I've met yet.
I am an Assistant Professor at Stockholm IIES (which you can follow on Twitter or whatever its called: @IIES_Sthlm). I received my PhD in economics from UC San Diego in 2017. If you're interested in my work, I'd love to hear from you! I can be reached at mitch.downey [at] iies.su.se.
Our excellent PhD student Jinci Liu is on the market this year. Her job market paper uses the random assignment of reviewers among certain projects on GitHub to estimate the causal effects of different types of feedback on programmers' performance. Spoiler: Giving hostile toxic feedback is terrible for the team. In addition to this and her other fantastic sole-authored work, our coauthored paper on political preferences and migration behavior of college graduates is now R&R at AEJ Applied. Jinci is great -- Please reach out to me if you want to hear more about her.