Research
Research
The Impact of World War II Army Service on Income and Mobility in the 1960s by Ethnoracial Group
with Andreas Ferrara, Price V. Fishback, and Misty L. Heggeness. Explorations in Economic History 97, July 2025.
Labor Market Shocks and Immigration Enforcement.
with Brianna Felegi and Sarina Heron. AEA Papers and Proceedings 115, May 2025
Understanding the Effects of a Math Placement Exam on Calculus I Enrollment and Engineering Persistence.
with Olivia Ryan, Susan Sajadi, and Reza Tavakoli. Education Sciences 15(2), January 2025
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Valuing Identity in the Classroom: What Economics Can Learn from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education
with Susan Sajadi, Sarah Jacobson, Marionette Holmes. Journal of Economic Perspectives 38(3), June 2024
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The Racial/Ethnic Gap in Financial Literacy in the Population and by Income
with Luisa Blanco, Salvador Contreras, and Marcos Angrisani. Contemporary Economic Policy 39(3) September 2020.
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An Investigation of Toxicities and Survival in Hispanic Children and Adolescents with ALL: Results from ALL Consortium
Protocol 05-001
with Justine Kahn, Peter Cole, Traci Blonquist, et al. Pediatric Blood and Cancer 65(3) March 2018.
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Economic Insecurity and Demand for Immigration Enforcement
with Brianna Felegi and Joaquin Rubalcaba
December 2025
Does increased labor market scarcity lead to more local demand for immigration enforcement? We answer this by evaluating the impact of the Great Recession on 287(g) partnerships that deputize local law enforcement to act as immigration enforcement agents. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that commuting zones that experienced higher unemployment during the Great Recession were significantly more likely to express interest in and adopt local immigration
enforcement partnerships. The results are concentrated among commuting zones with an above median share in pre-Recession immigrant population, workforce in the construction industry, and foreign born representation in routine manual occupations. Our results are consistent
with the hypothesis that adverse labor market shocks lead to greater support of policies
restricting immigrants ability to compete in local labor markets.
Exposure to the Military and Later Life Outcomes
December 2025
I examine whether declining exposure to veterans reduces adolescent’s future military service by using base closures that occurred between 1988-1995 as an exogenous source of variation in local veteran population share. I document that these closures have little impact on short run outcomes like tract level median earnings and that they strongly predict local veteran share. I find a one percentage point decrease in local veterans driven by base closures leads to a 27 percent decrease in local adolescents’ probability of military service. Decreases in veteran share also lead to lower arrest and higher bachelor’s attainment rates of young residents.
Adolescent Beliefs and Socioeconomic Inequality in Future Outcomes
December 2025
I investigate whether adolescents’ beliefs about future education attainment, early parenthood, and arrest predict future realizations of these events using the NLSY97. I find that these beliefs strongly predict later outcomes, where a one-percentage point increase in an adolescent’s belief of high school completion, bachelor’s attainment, early parenthood, or arrest are associated with between a 0.15 and 0.5 percentage point increase in the corresponding event actually occurring in the future even while controlling for academic ability, past risky behavior, household net worth, and social environment measures. I also find that these beliefs play an important role in explaining socioeconomic inequality in these outcomes. Socioeconomic differences in beliefs explain 26 percent of the difference in high school completion between adolescents from low versus high net worth households and between 9 to 20 percent of high school completion, bachelor’s attainment, and early parenthood differences between adolescents from middle versus high net worth households.
Is College Worth It For Me? Beliefs, Access to Funding and Inequality in Higher Education
In the US, the bachelor's attainment rate of White high-socioeconomic status youth is much higher than the bachelor's attainment rate of Hispanic, Black, and low-socioeconomic status youth. This is true even among students with high academic scores. For high-scorers, how much of these gaps in bachelor's attainment can be explained by differences in subjective beliefs about own academic ability? Relatedly, Is targeting information and funding to low socioeconomic status high-scorers more efficient at narrowing overall bachelor's attainment gaps than universal policies like free college for all, or a tracking system in the US? To answer these questions, I estimate the distribution of subjective prior beliefs about own ability using self reported beliefs about college outcomes from the NLSY97 and a dynamic discrete choice model with heterogeneous financial support and beliefs about ability. I find that for Black high-scorers beliefs play almost no statistically significant role in explaining gaps. However, for Hispanic and low socioeconomic status youth, differences in beliefs explain 38-49% of the gap relative to White high-socioeconomic status high-scorers. In the policy analysis I show that the targeted policy is the most efficient at closing gaps and that it closes overall gaps in bachelor's attainment by 25% to 42% depending on the comparison group. This suggests representation in higher education can be increased through recruiting low socioeconomic high scorers, but inequality will persist with differences in early childhood human capital stock and non pecuniary utility.