Influences & Inspiration
Papers & Ideas That Shaped My Thinking
Crime, Salience, and Housing Markets
Linden & Rockoff (2008) — Sex Offenders and Property Values
- Event-study around sex offender registry disclosures
- Housing markets respond sharply to newly salient crime information
Neighborhood Effects and Place-Based Opportunity
Moving to Opportunity (MTO) — Kling, Ludwig & Katz (2005)
- Randomized housing voucher experiment
- Neighborhood environments shape long-run outcomes
Institutions and Labor Market Discrimination
Bertrand & Mullainathan (2004) — Résumé Audit Experiment
- Randomized employer callbacks using racially distinctive names
- Institutional screening generates persistent inequities
Health Policy Evaluation at Scale
Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (2008–2010)
- Medicaid expansion assigned by lottery
- Insurance affects access and financial security
Food Environments and Behavioral Public Policy
Bollinger & Leslie (2011) — Menu Labeling and Consumer Choice
- Difference-in-differences around calorie labeling policy
- Consumer decisions respond to visible informational cues
Modern Difference-in-Differences and Policy Timing
Callaway & Sant’Anna (2021) — Staggered Adoption DiD
- Group-time ATT framework robust to TWFE bias
- Modern estimators for credible event studies
Computational Experiments and Market Institutions
Gode & Sunder (1993) — Zero-Intelligence Traders
- Laboratory markets with constrained random bidding
- Institutions generate equilibrium outcomes even with simple agents
- Kahneman & Tversky (1979), Prospect Theory Foundations for how attention and loss shape decisions.
Chetty et al. (2014), Neighborhood Effects Place as a causal environment.
Callaway & Sant’Anna (2021), Modern DiD Credible identification under staggered adoption.
Empirics Strike Back (Brodeur et al.) Reproducibility and transparency as a research norm. </div>
- Scholars & Mentors Who Inspire Me
My research is shaped by scholars whose work has influenced how economists and social scientists think about behavioral frictions, urban environments, and credible causal inference. I am especially inspired by researchers who connect rigorous empirical methods with deep questions about decision-making, institutions, and inequality.
Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky — for foundational insights on salience, loss aversion, and how individuals perceive risk and uncertainty.
Sendhil Mullainathan — for pioneering work on attention, scarcity, and behavioral constraints in economic life.
Raj Chetty — for demonstrating how neighborhoods and institutions shape opportunity and long-run outcomes.
Judea Pearl — for establishing the modern framework of causal reasoning through structural models and causal graphs, shaping how I think about identification and explanation.
Alberto Abadie — for foundational contributions to modern causal inference and policy evaluation.
Guido Imbens — for shaping the way economists think about identification, experiments, and credible empirical design.
Kosuke Imai — for methodological innovation at the intersection of statistics, political economy, and measurement.
Susan Athey — for pioneering work at the intersection of causal inference, machine learning, and policy evaluation, inspiring computational approaches to modern empirical questions.
Andreas Pape — for thoughtful mentorship and guidance on combining computational modeling with empirical rigor.
I see my own research agenda as building on these traditions—bringing behavioral mechanisms such as salience, memory, and social comparison into applied urban and institutional economics.