Working Papers
Public Data Infrastructure and Agricultural Development: Historical Evidence from Soil Mapping (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: This paper investigates how public data infrastructure shapes local economic development, focusing on a large-scale soil mapping program in US history. Since 1899, the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) was implemented to offer county-level soil maps and classification data. Leveraging newly digitized dataset and the staggered rollout of these maps across counties, I find a significant, persistent increase in local agricultural productivity by 5%, as well as a rising level of monoculture farming. I further provide evidence for a key channel: by reducing information barriers, soil maps incentivized farmers to adopt fertilizers and machinery, improve the precision of crop choices, expand self-owned farmland, and increase skilled labor input. I also rule out alternative explanations such as local innovation spillovers or aggregate market-based signals induced by these maps. My results thus highlight the tradeoff between productivity growth and sustainability associated with data-driven technology.
Selected for Presentation: Mountain West Economic History Conference, 2026; Economic History Association (EHA) conference, 2025; SEA annual conference, 2025; NCSS annual conference, 2025
Streamlining Paperwork: Prior Authorization and Substance Abuse Treatment Capacity (R&R at Journal of Law and Economics)
Abstract: In this paper, I investigate whether prior authorization requirements can influence the provision of behavioral healthcare services. By drawing on the staggered adoption of state laws restricting prior authorization for substance abuse treatments in commercial health plans, I find specialty care facilities are more likely to provide low-intensity (i.e., outpatient) services while decreasing the provision of high-intensity ones (i.e., intensive outpatient, partial hospital, inpatient). I provide supporting evidence for two plausible mechanisms. First, reducing administrative barriers expands facilities’ treatment capacity, allowing more timely access to early-stage interventions. Second, removing such burdens appears to shift provider behavior, including changes in prescribing practices. Overall, this paper highlights a novel and underappreciated source of cost associated with healthcare administrative processes: beyond direct bureaucratic costs, they can significantly constrain organizational capacity to deliver care.
Selected for Presentation: 13th Annual Conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon), San Diego; 2023 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference (APPAM); 2024 Eastern Economic Association (EEA) Annual Meetings, Boston; EuHEA Conference 2024, Vienna
Effects of Gender-Specific Workweek Restrictions (submitted), with Price V. Fishback, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth
Abstract: During the 1960s and 1970s, states across the US repealed laws that imposed limits on how many hours women could work in certain industries. We find that the repeal of these laws led to similar labor market effects for both men and women. In particular, the average workweek increased in length, and fewer people left the previously affected industries. In addition, both hourly and annual earnings fell. The effects for women are consistent with a model in which male and female labor are complements in production, and removing a workweek limit expands the supply of female labor. To explain the effects for men, we find evidence that repealing the female-specific workweek limit expanded the labor supply of spouses who also worked in affected industries. It suggested the complementarity of labor supply within households.
Selected for Presentation: 2025 NBER Summer Institute, Gender in the Economy; 2025 SOLE Conference, Toronto; 2025 ASSA Annual Conference, San Francisco; Mountain West Economic History Conference, 2025; BCAM Workshop, London (2026)
Product Safety Standards and Technological Innovation: Evidence from the 1968 Radiation Control (under review)
Abstract: Product safety regulation has been a ubiquitous policy tool throughout history. Debates typically center around the trade-off between safeguarding consumers and stifling the development of new products. In this paper, I study how stricter safety standards influence the nature and speed of medical innovation by drawing evidence from the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act. For the first time at the federal level, this Act mandated enforceable performance standards to control the radiation risk of electronic products. I find that in response to this act, firms developed new technologies reducing the risks of diagnostic X-ray medical equipment (an increase of 64.2% in patent count) as a key channel to lower compliance costs. I also document an increase of a similar magnitude for innovations representing new radiation-generating medical devices and show some suggestive evidence for the complementarity of risk mitigation and new technologies using radiation. I rule out several alternative explanations for these findings, including introducing the CT scan. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest substantial welfare gains as measured by health improvements and private market values due to these induced innovations.
Selected for Presentation: 2025 NBER Economics Analysis of Regulation meeting, 2025 Health Economics Initiative Annual Conference, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (University of Chicago), 2023 NBER pre-Summer Institute Graduate Student Session (Development of the American Economy), 2024 Barcelona GSE Summer Forum, Economics of Science and Innovation Workshop, Barcelona, 2nd Health Economics Conference, Toulouse School of Economics, 2024 ZEW conference on Innovation and Patenting, Mannheim (virtually), 2024 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference (APPAM), 2025 ASSA Annual Conference, San Francisco, 13th Annual Conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon), San Diego (poster), 2024 Western Economic Association International (WEAI) 99th Annual Conference, 93rd SEA Annual Conference, and 2024 Eastern Economic Association Annual Meetings, Boston.
Labor Market Effects of Pre-Hire Collective Bargaining Restrictions: Evidence from Construction Workers (submitted)
Selected for Presentation: 2026 SOLE Conference, Denver
In this paper, I study the labor market effects of pre-hire, project-specific collective bargaining by exploiting the staggered adoption of state restrictions on project labor agreements (PLAs) in public construction programs. I find restricting PLAs significantly increases the incidence of working overtime among construction workers, while imposing little effect on earnings and employment. Such effects are concentrated among non-union workers (who could otherwise be covered by PLAs) and immigrants, suggesting that limiting pre-hire collective bargaining weakens workers' bargaining power. My findings highlight the importance of extending labor protections to the temporary and project-based workforce.
Medical Necessity Standardization and Treatment Capacity: Evidence from Substance Use Disorders (under review)
Selected for Presentation: 2024 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference (APPAM)
Health plans can set arbitrary medical necessity criteria to restrict care in utilization review, creating uncertainty in medical billing. This paper examines whether standardizing these criteria affects the provision of healthcare services. Exploiting the staggered enactment of state laws mandating uniform, evidence-based criteria for commercial insurance plans covering substance abuse treatment, I find this standardization significantly increases the likelihood that such specialty facilities offer outpatient services by 1.9%. It also expands the average inpatient care capacity, proxied by a 31.3% decline in the probability of having facility-induced medical delay. These laws are also associated with a reduction in mortality from substance use disorders by 0.752 deaths per 100,000 persons. I provide evidence that these improvements cannot be explained by changes in patient selection, provider-insurer contracting, or physicians' prescribing behaviors. These findings suggest that reducing billing-related uncertainties can incentivize providers to expand access to life-saving behavioral health services, offering new insights into the design of regulations to simplify administrative hassles in health insurance.
Does Substance Control Affect Local Public Finance? Historical Evidence from Alcohol Prohibition (under review)
Selected for Presentation: 2025 Annual Conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon), Nashville
This paper examines how substance regulation shaped municipal finance, focusing on alcohol prohibition in the early twentieth-century United States. Using a newly digitized dataset and the staggered rollout of state and federal prohibition laws between 1911 and 1925, I implement a difference-in-differences design to estimate local fiscal effects. Prohibition led to a 67.27% decline in local business tax revenue, driven primarily by the loss of liquor license taxes. Municipal responses depended on initial fiscal conditions: financially constrained cities cut government expenditures, while fiscally healthier cities reduced outstanding debt and substituted toward greater reliance on property taxes. These results show how dependence on sin taxes can create fiscal vulnerability and shape adjustment strategies following major regulatory shocks.
Immigration Enforcement and Health Care Quality: Evidence from Home Health
Selected for Presentation: 2026 AEA-HERO Session; 2024 Annual Conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon), San Diego, 2024 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference (APPAM)
Does tightening immigration policies distort service quality within immigrant-intensive industries? To answer this question, I assess the causal effects of \textit{Secure Communities}, a county-based immigration enforcement program, on the quality of home care. Using establishment-level data and exploiting the staggered phase-in of \textit{Secure Communities}, I find that this program led to a rise in unexpected hospital admissions among patients and a decline in the provision of preventive care for bed sores. I present supporting evidence for a key channel: the number of immigrant workers significantly declined within the industry, leading to a rise in labor cost faced by home health agencies. I also rule out other alternative mechanisms, including changes in the number of patients/visits, the profitability of operation, and further adjustment of input mix.
Will Our Trousers Fit After the Quarantine? Effects of COVID-19 Lockdowns and Digital Social Support on Personal Health Choices with Tannista Banerjee and Arnab Nayak, R&R at Health Economics Review
Selected Projects in Progress
Anchoring Opportunities: Local Economic Effects of Healthcare Infrastructure (with Kelsey Moran (University of Miami))
Historical Roots of Gender Equity (with Yutong Chen (University of Texas, Arlington), funded by the University of Texas, Arlington)
Protective Labor Laws and Firms' Choices: Historical Evidence from the Textile Industry
Regulating Screening Technology: Distributional Effects of Pre-Employment Polygraph Test Bans
Does Language Assistance Affect Healthcare Service? Evidence from Substance Use Disorders