As an applied microeconomist, my research spans the fields of public, health, and behavioral economics. My current work centers on questions relating to children's background, their investments, and subsequent outcomes in various settings.
I utilize both naturally occurring variation and designed-based experiments to measure the causal effects of important events and policies on issues relating to children. My approach aims to provide robust insights into how different environments shape individual outcomes and how policies may influence these processes.
My ongoing research projects explore several facets of the economics of children and families:
Examining the private child adoption system and its potential ramifications on familial outcomes.
Investigating children in historical contexts, including those orphaned during the Orphan Train Movement and the education of children in early-to-mid 1900's Mississippi.
Studying children in vulnerable settings, such as the impact of CASA volunteers on foster children and the effects of job loss on household-level outcomes.
These projects contribute to our understanding of how various factors influence child development and family dynamics, with implications for policy and practice.
Abstract: In the United States, little has been studied regarding the private child adoption system. We partner with a large national adoption agency to examine a birth mother's decision-making process in a dynamic matching environment. We first build a model of search characterizing the features of the adoption process from the birth mother's perspective. Birth mothers exhibit significantly different search behavior by several factors such as race, stage of pregnancy, and financial stimulus. Then, utilizing quasi-random variation in the ordering of adoptive family profiles, we measure which features influences a birth mother's choice when selecting an adoptive family. We find a large and significant positive bias for profiles that are ordered first relative to any other position. Having an adoptive family's profile be placed in a position other than first within a menu of 20 adoptive family profiles is associated with a 71.47% average reduction in the odds of being selected. Further, we find preference for same-sex adoptive couples, however, we find virtually no other characteristic of either the birth mother or adoptive family, such as race, income, or age, to meaningfully contribute to the probability of being selected. These findings have important ramifications in understanding a birth mother's search and selection of an adoptive family in the child adoption setting, as well as providing a novel contribution to evidence behavioral biases in consequential decisions
Abstract: This project assesses the impact of the Orphan Train Movement, a radical program in United States designed to improve the welfare of orphaned children through physical relocation. Operating from the 1860s to the 1920s, New York City orphanages participating in the program relocated approximately 250,000 to 350,000 orphaned children to families across the United States. Utilizing data sourced from historical ledgers and state-level censuses, we compile information on orphanage residents during this period, digitizing it to create a novel dataset of eligible children for the orphan train program. These records are then linked to the complete-count decennial U.S. Censuses from 1860 to 1950. Cohorts of orphaned children assigned to the program were placed in communities across the United States based on the number of interested families within each location. Communities were canvased and selected by social workers associated with the participating orphanage. We first examine the differences in characteristics and subsequent socio-economic outcomes between orphan children in the program with those who remained in New York City. Then, we leverage a feature of the program, the independence between the timing of a particular child's admission into a participating orphanage and the selection of a particular location for placement, to create an instrument for as-good-as random migration destination. The results provide an estimate of the causal effect of location for orphan train participants on outcomes such as income, employment, and mortality accounting for differing familial characteristics. This project examines outcomes for both directly affected individuals and subsequent generations, providing important insights into the immediate and persistent human capital and socioeconomic impacts of migration, familial characteristics, and location through examining a historically significant child welfare program.
“Returns to School Inputs in the Short, Medium, and Long Run” with Mary Kate Batistich, Kalena E. Cortes, and Kendall J. Kennedy
Abstract: This paper explores the implementation of a price-level targeting regime compared to an inflation targeting regime in the basic New Keynesian framework. Additionally, expectations are defined under a baseline method and an alternative method. Both monetary policy regimes implement Survey of Professional Forecasters' data as survey expectations for the baseline method and conversely use adaptive expectations as the alternative method of defining expectations. The results of the simulation show price-level targeting is preferred to inflation targeting under a favorable inflation shock if expectations are defined by the baseline method. However, inflation targeting provides a better result than price-level targeting if expectations are defined under the alternative method. This result raises important questions in defining expectations but does not dismiss an adoption of price-level targeting as a potentially superior rule in a monetary policy regime.