Papers and scholars that have shaped how I think about causal inference, urban environments, behavioral economics, and computational modeling. I also maintain the Methods Lab — an open-access interactive platform with 40+ simulation-based modules for econometrics, causal inference, and Bayesian reasoning.
Scholars & Mentors
My research is shaped by scholars whose work has influenced how economists think about behavioral frictions, urban environments, and credible causal inference.
Foundational insights on salience, loss aversion, and how individuals perceive risk and uncertainty.
Pioneer of behavioral economics — mental accounting, the endowment effect, and nudge theory. Nobel Prize 2017.
Pioneering work on attention, scarcity, and behavioral constraints in economic life.
Establishing the modern framework of causal reasoning through structural models and causal graphs. Turing Award 2011.
Foundational contributions to modern causal inference and policy evaluation.
Shaping how economists think about identification, experiments, and credible empirical design. Nobel Prize 2021.
Methodological innovation at the intersection of statistics, political economy, and measurement.
Pioneering work at the intersection of causal inference, machine learning, and policy evaluation.
Pioneering work on research transparency, reproducibility, and publication bias in empirical economics.
Demonstrating how neighborhoods and institutions shape opportunity and long-run outcomes.
Distinguished Professor at Binghamton. Foundational contributions to labor economics, human capital theory, and the economics of gender wage differentials.
Labor economics and economics of education, with emphasis on developing new econometric methods robust to failures of standard identifying assumptions.
Computational and behavioral economics — combining agent-based modeling with empirical rigor to study economic behavior and market institutions.
Econometrics and applied microeconomics — identification, causal inference, and synthetic control methods for policy evaluation.
Labor Economics
Landmark Papers
The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market
Sudden immigration shock had little effect on Miami wages — labor markets absorb supply shocks.
1990
Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
Natural experiment using NJ minimum wage hike — employment did not fall, reshaping labor economics.
1994
Using Geographic Variation in College Proximity to Estimate the Return to Schooling
College proximity as IV — returns to education are higher for those induced to attend by proximity.
1995
Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of Blind Auditions on Female Musicians
Blind auditions substantially increase the likelihood of women advancing — institutions shape discrimination.
2000
The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change
Routine-biased technological change — technology substitutes for routine tasks and complements cognitive ones.
2003
Does Your High School Matter? Measuring Teacher Value-Added
Teacher quality has large long-run effects on earnings, college attendance, and teen birth rates.
2014
A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter
The remaining gender pay gap is driven by the value of workplace flexibility, not discrimination alone.
2014
Child Penalties Across Countries: Evidence and Explanations
Motherhood drives most of the gender earnings gap — child penalties are large and persistent across countries.
2019
Urban Economics
Landmark Papers
Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing
Randomized housing voucher experiment — neighborhood environments shape long-run economic and health outcomes.
2005
Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?
Land use regulations — zoning restrictions drive up housing costs more than construction costs.
2005
Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan's Law
Housing markets respond sharply to newly salient crime information — direct motivation for salience-based housing research.
2008
The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion
Adding roads increases driving proportionally — transportation infrastructure and urban sprawl.
2011
Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big Push
Tennessee Valley Authority — place-based industrial policy raised manufacturing wages but had mixed aggregate effects.
2014
The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children
Every year in a better neighborhood improves long-run outcomes — place has a causal effect on children.
2018
Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation
Zoning restrictions in high-productivity cities reduce US GDP by 2% — spatial misallocation has aggregate consequences.
2019
Causal Inference & Methods
Landmark Papers
Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics
Classic critique of specification searching and data mining — a foundational call for credible empirical practice.
1983
Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects
The LATE framework — IV identifies effects for compliers, not the full population.
1994
Identification of Causal Effects Using Instrumental Variables
Foundational paper on the potential outcomes framework for IV.
1996
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?
Résumé audit experiment — institutional screening generates persistent labor market inequities.
2004
The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics
How better identification strategies — RCTs, IV, RDD, DiD — transformed empirical economics into a credible science.
2010
Double/Debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Structural Parameters
DML — uses cross-fitting and Neyman orthogonality to combine ML with causal inference.
2018
Difference-in-Differences with Multiple Time Periods
Group-time ATT framework — robust to TWFE bias under staggered adoption.
2021
Behavioral, Computational & Research Replicability
Landmark Papers
Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk
Foundations for how attention, loss aversion, and salience shape economic decisions.
1979
Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias
People demand more to give up an object than they would pay to acquire it — loss aversion shapes market behavior.
1991
Allocative Efficiency of Markets with Zero-Intelligence Traders
Institutions generate equilibrium outcomes even with minimally rational agents.
1993
A Dynamic Model of an Individual's Income and Wealth
Heterogeneous agent model — precautionary savings and incomplete markets.
1994
Attention Discrimination
Selective attention in screening — how limited attention amplifies discrimination.
2016
Research Replicability & Transparency
Landmark Papers
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
Foundational paper on false discovery rates — low power, researcher flexibility, and bias inflate Type I errors.
2005
Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science
Only 36% of psychology findings replicated — landmark call for reproducibility standards across sciences.
2015
Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back
Systematic evidence of p-hacking in economics — test statistics bunch just below conventional significance thresholds.
2016
Evaluating Replicability of Laboratory Experiments in Economics
61% of economics lab experiments replicated — effect sizes in replications are about half of originals.
2016
Identification of and Correction for Publication Bias
Structural model of publication bias — provides a method to correct estimates for selective reporting.
2019
Methods Matter: p-Hacking and Publication Bias in Causal Inference
Publication bias is larger for IV and DiD designs than OLS — identification strategy affects selective reporting.
2020
Health Economics
Landmark Papers
Health Insurance Coverage and Medical Expenditures
RDD around Medicare eligibility at age 65 — insurance sharply reduces out-of-pocket spending.
2008
Does Medicare Save Lives?
Near-elderly mortality — Medicare eligibility reduces mortality for low-income groups.
2009
Menu Labeling and Consumer Choice
DiD around calorie labeling policy — consumer decisions respond to visible informational cues.
2011
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment
Medicaid expansion by lottery — insurance affects access, utilization, and financial security.
2012
Behavioral Hazard in Health Insurance
Patients underuse beneficial care — behavioral frictions distort health decisions beyond moral hazard.
2015