I am an Associate Professor of Economics at New York University. My research focuses on industrial policy and growth, and I teach courses on economic development and applied methods. If you are interested, my CV is here.

NYU has many excellent job market candidates this year, and I am lucky to have advised four of them. Please feel reach out if you are interested in hearing more about any of them.

Aya Jibet is a labor economist, studying education and inequality. In her job market paper, she studies an affirmative action program at Sciences Po that provides students from underprivileged backgrounds with an alternative admissions track, based on different and generally less selective criteria. Critics of the program raise two concerns. The first is “mismatch”: that these admits may be underprepared for the elite and demanding environment of Sciences Po and might perform better elsewhere. The second is “efficiency”: that the marginal mainstream-track reject would have benefited more from admission than the marginal affirmative action-track admit, implying a misallocation of educational resources. Using confidential data on all college applicants and leveraging idiosyncratic variation in the judges evaluating the oral component of the application, Aya is able to study both issues and reject these criticisms. Quasi-randomly admitted affirmative action students outperform those who were rejected on multiple margins, and the gains for the affirmative action track are larger than those on the mainstream track, broadly because the outside options for the mainstream track are generally other elite programs, which is less true for students admitted through affirmative action. She additionally shows that a variety of programs within Sciences Po that promote catch-up for the affirmative action admits, such as mentorship, are very successful. Aya also has several additional projects examining broader implications of the program, including its role in fostering integration at Sciences Po and shaping the aspirations of eligible high school students.

Jiwon Lee is a labor economist studying families. In her job market paper, she uses descriptive, reduced form, and causal methods to study how families negotiate high-stakes decisions, in particular migration. Using rich Australian data, she shows that negotiation is important: sometimes only one spouse wants to move, and so couples have to bargain to decide what the family does. She shows that child presence lowers the likelihood that mothers get their way. In order to rationalize these results, she builds a dynamic model of household decision-making (without commitment), with endogenous fertility, job search, and migration. In addition to being an impressive technical contribution, the model also matches a variety of salient features of the setting, including how different types of families responded to a policy change that lowered child benefits for single-earner households. Jiwon also has an active research agenda on related topics, including take-up of parental leave, family planning, and how motherhood affects employment.

Yucheng Lu is an applied microeconomist, with research interests in AI. In his job market paper, he studies how the rollout of ChatGPT affected research production. Using data from a leading computation conference (ICLR), he shows that ChatGPT led to an increase of submission in relatively more empirical (and less mathematical) papers, driven by researchers who had not previously participated in the conference. Yucheng develops a Roy model to rationalize these findings. He has a rich research agenda using language models to study a variety of economic settings, including monetary, trade, and research policy. 

Helena Pedrotti is an IO economist, with research interests in housing and inequality. In her job market paper, Helena studies a French program that promotes housing equity. In particular, the government encourages municipalities to build social housing, but has an opt-out mechanism as municipalities can instead choose to pay a fine (this is a common feature of these kinds of policies). Leveraging a population discontinuity in program coverage, Helena finds that the program has bite and leads to large increases in social housing. This has effects on the population in market housing as well: relatively wealthy residents leave and are replaced by relatively poorer residents. Helena rationalizes these results by estimating a spatial model of housing demand with preference for neighbors, arguing that relatively wealthy residents particularly dislike poor neighbors. She then turns to discussing program design, and in particular the opt-out feature. As wealthy communities opt out completely, this puts pressure on other communities, as it makes the outside option of moving out more attractive for wealthy residents in communities that do choose to build social housing. She finds that removing the opt-out feature would have large implications for how the program could reduce spatial segregation through these equilibrium effects. Helena has an active research agenda studying neighborhood change, including a project understanding the spatial effects of the construction of accessory dwelling units.