I am a Senior Business Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
This site provides information on my current research. I am broadly interested in banking, macroeconomics, and monetary policy. The views on this site are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.
What's New
9/26/2025: We have a new draft of our working paper on the macroeconomic impact of the recent immigration surge within the U.S.; this is joint work with colleagues at the Dallas Fed.
2/25/2025: My paper with Isabel Gödl-Hanisch and Jonathan Rawls was accepted for publication at the European Economic Review.
11/7/2023: I have moved! I started in my new role at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in September.
Abstract: The U.S. experienced an extraordinary surge in immigration from 2021 to 2024, which triggered widespread discussions about its macroeconomic impact, particularly on inflation. To determine the impact of the immigration surge, we first document the salient features of these new immigrants: they are primarily low-skilled relative to the existing workforce and more likely to be hand-to-mouth consumers. We then incorporate these features into a heterogeneous agent model with capital-skill complementarity. We find that the supply- and demand-side effects of the immigration surge roughly cancel out, causing a negligible response of inflation.
Abstract: The New Keynesian literature focuses on rules-based interest rate policies, abstracting from the role of monetary aggregates. In the background, though, the quantity equation must hold --- every transaction requires money, with money units used in multiple transactions within a period. What is often overlooked is that imposing a rules-based interest rate policy is equivalent to assuming a particular money velocity specification. Using this alternative specification, we derive the efficient money supply rule and show that determinate equilibria exist with money supply policy and a fixed nominal interest rate. We estimate a New Keynesian model with either conventional interest rate policy or our money market reinterpretation of the model, accounting for the policy rate lower bound (PRLB). The money market estimates exactly match the PRLB duration in the data, whereas the conventional estimates fall short by four years.