Research
Working Papers
Until the late 19th century, families in some U.S. municipalities paid small user fees, known as rate bills, for their children to attend public schools. Urban school districts gradually repealed these fees and funded public education through local taxes, but rural areas continued to charge tuition until state-level policies abolished the practice for public schools. Using United States Census data and a staggered adoption difference-in-differences approach, I show that rate bill abolition increased rural primary school attendance by 7.2 percentage points. These results suggest that small costs can be an obstacle to school attendance and inhibit the diffusion of education.
Previous research has highlighted referee bias a a potential contributor to home field advantage in soccer. In order to shed light on the importance of referee bias, we exploit the staggered implementation of Video Assistant Referee (VAR) using data from the top domestic league in 16 countries between 2009 and 2019 to estimate the effect of objective review systems on home field advantage in soccer. Surprisingly, the implementation of VAR had negligible effects on home field advantage despite decreased total offsides and yellow cards. These results provide suggestive evidence regarding the mechanisms through which referee bias might contribute to home field advantage and highlight how scope may limit the effectiveness of review processes in general.
Publications
This paper studies the effect of fan attendance on home field advantage in top European soccer leagues. We exploit exogenous variation in the level of fan attendance driven by COVID-19 mitigation policies and find that the home field advantage, as measured by home goals minus away goals, is reduced by 57% across the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, and Spanish La Liga. We find that this leads to a decrease in probability for a home win, indicating that these goals are pivotal with respect to match outcomes.
Multiplicities: Adding a Vertex to a Graph (with Kenji Toyonaga and Charles R. Johnson) (Springer Link or github)
Applied and Computational Matrix Analysis: International Conference on Matrix Analysis and its Applications (2017)
Given an Hermitian matrix A whose graph G is a simple undirected graph and its eigenvalues, we suppose the status of each vertex in the graph is known for each eigenvalue of A. We investigate the change of the multiplicity of each eigenvalue, when we add a pendent vertex with given value to a particular vertex in the graph via an edge with given weight. It is shown how each multiplicity changes based on this information. The results are applied to show that more than one eigenvalue may increase in multiplicity with the addition of just one vertex. The intended focus is trees, but the analysis is given for general graphs.