Publications

Investigating the American Dream: The Role of Neighborhoods
Handbook of the Economics of Intergenerational Mobility, forthcoming

Using NLSY data and a general equilibrium model with local spillovers, this chapter shows that more segregated U.S. cities have significantly lower intergenerational mobility. A utilitarian planner would sort families by children's productivity rather than income, achieving higher mobility. Transfer policies targeting low-income families improve welfare but cannot restore efficiency

Comments on: A Wartime Labour Market: The Case of Ukraine
Economic Policy Papers on European and Global Issues, forthcoming

This comment discusses a paper studying Ukraine's labour market after Russia's 2022 invasion. While the paper finds that matching efficiency declined only modestly, this comment suggests that the resilience may partly reflect selection and composition effects . The comment also highlights the potential long run effects of labor market changes with particular attention to the long-run challenges of human capital erosion and brain drain but also reflecting on the potential for war-driven shifts in gender norms induced by the rise of female labor force participation.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Neighborhood Policies: A Dynamic Analysis
NBER Macroeconomic Annual, forthcoming

This paper builds a general equilibrium model of a city with residential sorting, educational investment, and endogenous local spillovers to compare three neighborhood policies: housing vouchers, place-based transfers, and place-based investment in local institutions. Vouchers generate large gains for recipients, but scaling them up dampens benefits and hurts non-recipients. Transfers increase welfare but also induce more segregation and inequality. Transition dynamics suggest that place based investment policies can induce the larger gains over time while also reducing segregation and increasing interegenerational mobility.

The End of the American Dream? Inequality and Segregation in US Cities
Journal of Political Economy, April 2026

Since the 1980s, rising income inequality and residential segregation have reinforced each other in US cities through local spillovers affecting returns to education. Calibrating a general equilibrium model to 1980 data and using Chetty and Hendren's neighborhood exposure estimates, we show that segregation accounts for roughly 20–29% of the subsequent increase in inequality. Scaling up MTO-style relocation policies helps, but general equilibrium effects limit their efficacy.

Article on the Economist
Research Brief BFI
Video presentation Minneapolis Fed

Discussion of Joint Search over the Life Cycle
Journal of Monetary Economics, March 2025.

This discussion uses a simplified model to illustrate the complementarity between the paper's two channels explaining the declining added worker effect over the life cycle. It also highlights an alternative insurance mechanism where married women reducing employment exits rather than increasing entries. The paper notes that unemployment insurance may crowd out spousal labor supply with potential long-run costs.

Challenges and Opportunities from the Pandemic in Europe: The Case of Italy
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), August 2021

This policy brief examines how Italy's older population and high intergenerational cohabitation amplified COVID-19's impact. Using a network model calibrated to Milan, we show that more targeted policies could have reduced deaths at the same output cost. The brief also discusses the EU's Next Generation EU recovery plan as an opportunity for Italy's structural reform.

Germs, Social Networks, and Growth
Review of Economic Studies, May 2021

When societies form their social institutions, they do so, in part, to protect themselves from the spread of disease. But such social structures may inhibit the diffusion of new technologies and restrain economic development.

Article on Research Digest

Nature or Nurture? Learning and the Geography of Female Labor Force Participation
Econometrica, July 2011

The increase in female labor force participation and its geographic pattern was driven partly by the diffusion of information about the effects of maternal employment on childhood development.

Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs,Work, and Fertility
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2009

We study culture by examining the work and fertility behavior of second-generation American women. Culture is proxied with past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the woman’s country of ancestry. We show that the cultural proxies have positive significant explanatory power even after controlling for education and spousal characteristics, and we demonstrate that the results are unlikely to be explained by unobserved human capital.

Family: The Role of Culture and Family Experience
Journal of European Economic Association, 2006

This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman’s country of ancestry as the cultural proxy and use the woman’s number of siblings to capture her direct family experience. We find that both variables are significant determinants of fertility, even after controlling for several individual and family-level characteristics.

Mothers and Sons: Preference Formation and Female Labor Force Dynamics
The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 2004

This paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man–one brought up in a family in which the mother worked–has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time. We present cross-sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work. We use variation in the importance of WWII as a shock to women’s labor force participation–as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across US states–to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism.

Working Papers

Neighborhood Segregation and Endogenous Racial Bias

This paper shows that racial income gaps are larger in more segregated U.S. regions. In a general equilibrium model, black and white agents differ only in initial income due to historical racial institutions. When ability is inferred from income without accounting for unequal neighborhood exposure, an endogenous racial bias emerges, sustained by income segregation. A race-targeted transfer can break this feedback loop.

Social Distance Policies in ECON EPI Networks
NBER Working Paper w27741

HELP! Slides

NBER SI Aging Slides

This paper studies the economic and epidemiological trade-offs of social distancing policies using a model where economic interactions and disease transmission are embedded in the same network. The structure of social and economic connections shapes both the spread of infection and the costs of containment, making network topology central to optimal policy design.

The Geography of the Great Recession
NBER Working Paper w18447

This paper documents, using county level data, some geographical features of the US business cycle over the past 30 years, with particular focus on the Great Recession. It shows that county level unemployment rates are spatially dispersed and spatially correlated, and documents how these characteristics evolve during recessions.