Upcoming Presentations

Abstract: Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but large-scale climate mitigation in this sector depends on whether conservation practices are privately profitable for farmers. This paper studies two core regenerative practices in U.S. row-crop systems --- cover cropping and no till --- and asks whether adoption improves farm profitability while building soil carbon. Empirically, I combine a panel of corn, soybean, and wheat farmers in the Midwest from 2010 - 2025 with a machine-learned county-year soil panel trained on ground-truth soil tests to examine farmer decisions and outcomes to changes in the soil. I estimate reduced-form using a staggered difference-in-difference design to address endogenous adoption. I then map the estimated relationships into a structural model of farmer decision-making to evaluate adoption incentives under heterogeneous farm conditions. Preliminary estimates show that long-run improvements in soil organic carbon (SOC) drive long-run production gains, but profitability is muted by switching costs of adoption. This suggest a potential large-scale climate mitigation strategy for row crop production.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series

Abstract: Structural models often fix (calibrate) some parameters and estimate the rest, but this calibration–estimation partition is usually chosen by convention. This paper treats that choice as an econometric partition-selection problem. For each admissible partition, we construct a scalar sensitivity statistic measuring the local response of a target object—such as a policy effect, welfare measure, impulse response, or treatment effect—to perturbations of the calibrated parameters. The selected partition minimizes this statistic and therefore minimizes worst-case local bias from calibration errors. We first illustrate the decision problem in two canonical examples. We then apply it to the New Keynesian model of Nakamura and Steinsson (2018), where the partition choice has large implications for credibility: some partitions remain reliable under sizeable miscalibrations, whereas others generate large bias from small calibration errors. The procedure requires only local derivatives, avoids repeated re-estimation, and applies to a broad class of structural models.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series

Abstract: Whether a mother's employment helps or harms her child depends on how well formal childcare substitutes for her time. I estimate a household life-cycle model of work arrangements, time, and child skill formation on UK panel data, and find that this substitutability differs sharply by education. Using the paid-versus-self-employment margin, I decompose a work arrangement into three attributes: flexibility, earnings level, and earnings volatility. Fathers' time responds little to a young child, so mothers are the sole margin of adjustment. A college-educated mother's time is her child's most productive input, which formal care substitutes for poorly, while for a non-college mother it substitutes well. Full-time employment therefore lowers a child's skills by 0.15–0.22 SD when the mother is college educated but raises them by 0.12–0.16 SD when she is not. Flexible hours without a pay penalty raise maternal employment by up to 4 percentage points but leave child skills essentially unchanged, because mothers take the added hours from leisure rather than time with the child. Childcare raises skills only when tagged by education. Pairing the two policies benefits both groups and raises the projected lifetime earnings of children of non-college mothers by up to 6 percent.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series

Abstract: While a large literature has examined how bank credit shocks affect firms or households, it has not accounted for the fact that such shocks may simultaneously impact both. In this paper, we overcome this limitation and disentangle the real impact of a credit market disruption into the effect of firm-side credit shocks, individual-side credit shocks, and their interaction. To this end, we construct a novel dataset linking Norwegian employees to their employers and their respective bank relationships. We show that individuals’ labor income and consumption decline by 1–2% when only they or only their employer face a credit shock, compared to the benchmark where neither do. However, when individuals and their employer simultaneously face a credit shock, labor income and consumption decline by nearly 6%, revealing a strong amplification effect. This amplification arises because personal credit constraints hinder individuals’ consumption smoothing and job search when confronted with wage cuts or layoffs triggered by their employer’s credit constraints. Our findings suggest that this mechanism also shapes the aggregate transmission of credit shocks.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series