Hi, and thanks for visiting my website!
I’m an applied micro economist interested in a broad set of topics. Fundamentally, I’m interested in public policy and how to have an effective, high-performing government that improves people's lives. One major challenge is how to do this within a polarized democracy. I strongly believe that policy cannot be separated from politics (that's the definition of democracy), and so a hostile and divisive political climate has real effects on the policy-making and policy-implementation process. A lot of my research focuses on understanding this and what we can do about it.
As an undergrad at UM St. Louis, I met a lot of brilliant, impressive, energetic people whose family struggles with poverty and hardship created challenges for them that I’d never experienced, so inequality has long been an animating issue for me. I graduated during the Great Recession and watched many of these same people struggle to land on their feet, so the labor market has long been an animating issue for me. I then worked in DC at the Urban Institute (the beating heart of the left-leaning technocratic evidence-based policy movement) at the time of the Tea Party Revolution, so polarization, politicization, and government dysfunction have long been animating issues for me. And I’m from St. Louis and have a lot of family in Ferguson, so the murder of Michael Brown really moved me, and the criminal justice system, how well it is working, and how it can be improved have long been animating issues for me.
Depending on how or how many of these different issues get combined, you call my work political economy, labor economics, or law and economics/economics of crime. I’m ok with any of those labels, but field labels aren’t especially interesting to me. While these issues are particularly important to me, I try to follow a broader range of policy debates and I'm interested in most papers that help me think about those debates in some way, whether those papers are in org econ, trade, macro, development, or political science.
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 more fun and more interesting 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.