Research areas: Public Finance, Urban Economics, Economics of Education

I am an applied microeconomist with research interests in public, urban, and education economics. My research aims to uncover the causes and welfare effects of regional disparities, with a particular focus on the dynamics of multi-level governance.

My job market paper examines unequal capital investment across K-12 schools, with a focus on understanding how disparities in facility investment drive household sorting across schools and neighborhoods.

I expect to graduate in 2025 and will be available for interviews during the 2024-25 job market.

Who Benefits from Local Bond Elections? Evidence from California’s School Bond Reform (job market paper)

Abstract: This paper examines a significant 2001 reform that enhanced the fiscal independence of California school districts. I document the reform’s differential impact on school facilities investment across districts and provide new evidence on the spatial sorting consequences of these investments. Using the reform as a natural experiment, I identify effects on public spending, household sorting, housing markets, and academic outcomes in districts that leveraged the change. Between 2001 and 2017, these districts’ annual capital spending per student rose by 60 percent compared to the previous decade, boosting their capital stock by the equivalent of three additional years of average capital spending. This increase is concentrated in districts with high income heterogeneity, leading to greater inequality in the provision of school facilities between districts at different levels of property wealth. Overall effects on household sorting are negligible, but in unified districts that leveraged the reform, home prices and rents declined, the concentration of bottom-tercile income earners rose, and income heterogeneity increased. Consistent with policy objectives, the main beneficiaries of the increased spending are existing residents of the districts that leveraged the reform, especially those with a lower property tax burden. These findings have direct implications for proposed school district and local government borrowing policies in several states.

How Well-Targeted Are Payroll Tax Cuts as a Response to COVID-19? Evidence from China

Abstract: Numerous countries cut payroll taxes in response to COVID-19, including China, which reduced employer contributions by up to 21 percentage points. We use administrative data on more than 800,000 Chinese firms to evaluate payroll tax cuts as a business relief measure. We estimate that the tax cuts cover 31.5% of the decline in business cash flow, but labor informality causes 53% of registered firms-24% of aggregate economic activity-to receive no benefits at all. We quantify the targeting of the policy in terms of how much benefits flow to small firms less able to access external finance and to sectors worse hit by COVID-19. We find that (1) small firms and vulnerable industries are comparatively more labor intensive, which leads to desirable targeting; (2) labor informality worsens, but does not eliminate, targeting by firm size; and (3) labor informality is uncorrelated with the COVID-19 shock, and therefore does not affect targeting by sector.

• C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2024
• UBC Centre for Innovative Data in Economics Research (CIDER) Small Grant ($13,115), 2023
• Four-Year Doctoral Fellowship, UBC, 2017-2021
• SSIS Dean’s Award, CSU Sacramento, 2017
• Robert and Chi-Ming Dana Curry Scholarship in Economics, CSU Sacramento, 2016

Training at the UBC Centre for the Integration of Teaching, Research and Learning

• Foundations of Pedagogy, Sept – Nov 2022
• Graduate Online Instructional Skills Workshop, Jan – Feb 2021

Teaching Assistantships:

• Research Design and Policy Evaluation in Economics (Masters level), 2024
• Economics of Labor Markets (4^th year undergraduate), 2024
• Economics of Public Expenditures (4^th year undergraduate), 2021
• Introduction to International Trade (3^rd year undergraduate), 2019
• Principles of Microeconomics (1^st year undergraduate), 2019