U-M Economics

ALT Dissertation: Essays on Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa This dissertation studies novel interventions for improving human capital in sub-Saharan Africa. In my first essay, I identify how school’s overlap with the farm calendar reduced grade advancement in Malawi and show how scheduling school to avoid peak farming periods can improve school participation. In my other essays, I run RCTs in response to COVID-19 to evaluate the impact of 1) instructional feedback and financial incentives on teaching health information to adults, and 2) correcting misperceived norms to promote health behavior change.

ALT Dissertation: Essays on the Economics of Student Loans and Economic Demography This dissertation studies the causes of key human capital outcomes in the United States. Beginning with education, we examine how the specific repayment plan structure of student loans changes investment behavior of borrowers and subsequent labor market activity, plausibly affecting both the skills mix--via major selection while in school--and occupation selection--via optimal search behavior on the labor market--of the college-educated workforce. In demography, John Bound, Timothy Waidmann, Arline Geronimus, and I examine how the recent opioid epidemic in the U.S. has led to “spillover” mortality, deaths which are not directly attributable to opioid usage on death certificates but are caused by opioid use. We find evidence that prior estimates of spillover are potentially driven by deteriorating economic and social conditions and that prior estimates are sensitive to time, drug and populations studied, s

ALT Dissertation: Essays in Housing and Demography This dissertation is an analysis of policy issues and historical patterns in housing markets and its connections to the demographic attributes of households. Chapter 1 studies Houston’s significant reduction of the minimum lot size in 1999. I find that reducing the minimum lot size promoted the development of smaller housing, and these changes disproportionately helped younger, poorer, and smaller households. Chapter 2 studies the demographic determinants of housing regulations. I show that places in the United States which had larger baby booms developed more housing regulations. Using WWII-induced variation in the size of the Baby Boom, I show that this relationship is plausibly causal, and that the empirical patterns are consistent with existing political economy models of housing regulation. Chapter 3 analyzes the distributional effect of new housing construction by tracing housing vacancy chains. I construct matched buyers/sellers ch