I’m a first-year Ph.D. student in economics at the University of Michigan. I’m interested in research at the intersection of labor, public, and urban/spatial economics.
Prior to beginning my Ph.D., I worked as a research analyst at Stanford University on the State and Local Governance Initiative at the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Initiative for Business, Taxation, and Society (STAX) at the Graduate School of Business. I also worked as an associate at Keystone Strategy in New York, an economics and strategy consulting firm.
I received a BA in economics and computer science from Middlebury College in 2022, and an MA in the social sciences (concentration in economics) from the University of Chicago in 2024.
For more information, please see my CV.
Working Papers
Employment Dynamics of $15 Minimum Wage Phase-Ins: Evidence from New Jersey
Master’s Thesis, May 2024
Updated draft in preparation.
Abstract
In 2019, New Jersey enacted legislation to phase in a $15 minimum wage, rapidly boosting the state minimum by 71 percent in under five years. I provide one of the first empirical analyses of a wage increase of this nature and introduce a novel empirical design that combines synthetic control with a wage-distribution binning approach. I examine the employment dynamics resulting from five wage increases taking effect between July 2019 and January 2023. Each increase generates missing jobs below the new wage floor and excess jobs above it, with excess jobs dominating and producing temporary boosts in employment. Overall, I find no evidence of a sustained increase or decrease in employment from the phase-in. These findings inform debates on whether gradual phase-ins mitigate concerns about disemployment from large minimum wage hikes.Works in Progress
Firm-Level Productivity and the Fiscal Returns to Customized Job Training (with Natalie Millar)
Research Supported
Firm Investment and the User Cost of Capital: New US Corporate Tax Reform Evidence (Jonathan Hartley, Kevin Hassett, and Joshua Rauh)
Tax Policy and the Economy, vol. 40, 2026.
Abstract
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) marked the first time in three decades that material changes were made to the corporate tax code of the United States. Following the method of Auerbach and Hassett (1991), we use TCJA as a natural experiment to estimate the impact of changes in user cost of capital on investment. Using cross-sectional data, we find that the user cost is associated with higher rates of investment consistent with previous studies. BEA asset types with greater reductions in user cost of capital and marginal effective tax rate (METR) after the 2017 TCJA had greater increases in their investment rates several years after the tax reform, with individually statistically significant coefficients in half of the post-TCJA years. On average across years we find the magnitude of a 1 percentage point decrease in user cost is associated with a statistically significant 1.86 percentage point increase in the rate of investment. This translates into an investment elasticity of-2.11, about three times the investment response assumed in Congressional Budget Office models.Business Incentives and Economic Activity: Evidence from Alabama (Rebecca Lester, Natalie Millar, and Joshua Rauh)
In progress.