Job Market Paper

"Climate Change, Incomplete Regulation, and Imperfect Competition: Evidence from South American Agriculture" (draft coming soon)

I study the design of environmental policy in settings with incomplete regulation and market power. To this end, I build an empirical model of the South American agricultural sector, a global agricultural powerhouse and a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. On the supply side, I extend quantitative trade models to capture the three key margins driving agricultural emissions: land conversion, commodity choice, and input substitution in livestock production. I estimate these margins from data covering 20% of the world's cattle stock and half of its soybean production. On the demand side, I extend the standard analysis of incomplete regulation by introducing monopsony power, requiring atomistic farmers to sell their output to large agribusiness firms in order to access consumer markets. I use firm-level customs data to document concentration—for example, in the median county the top 3 firms account for 96% of beef exports—as well as to estimate mark-downs on farm-gate prices. Given the infeasibility of a global carbon tax, I use my framework to evaluate second-best policies along efficiency and distributional grounds. The findings suggest policy in this setting is uniquely constrained by its regressive impact on both consumers and farmers, and efficient design is non-trivial due to leakage risk from globally integrated commodity markets and market power of agribusiness firms over farmers.

• Upcoming presentations at UChicago/Northwestern (EMCON 2020), Warwick (8th Economics PhD Conference), Urban Economics Association (Annual meeting), Spanish Economic Association (Annual Symposium).

• Presented at UPenn (2020 Young Economist Symposium), NYU (Applied Micro Lunch, Econometrics Lunch, Stern Workshop).

Other Research Projects

"Location Sorting and Endogenous Amenities: Evidence from Amsterdam"

with Milena Almagro (Minneapolis Fed and Chicago Booth)

This paper argues the endogeneity of amenities plays a crucial role in the welfare distribution of a city's residents by reinforcing location sorting. We quantify this channel by leveraging spatial variation in tourism flows and the entry of home-sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, as shifters of location characteristics to estimate a dynamic model of residential choice. In our model, consumption amenities in each location are the equilibrium outcome of a market for services, which are supplied by firms and demanded by heterogeneous households. We estimate the model using detailed Dutch microdata, which allows us to track the universe of Amsterdam's residents over time and the evolution of a rich set of neighborhood amenities. Our results indicate significant heterogeneity across households in their valuation of different amenities, as well as in the response of amenities to demographic composition. We show that allowing for this endogenous response increases inequality between demographic groups whose preferences are closely aligned, but decreases it if substantially misaligned, suggesting heterogeneity in the two-way mapping between households and amenities plays a crucial distributive role. Finally, we highlight the distributional implications of our estimates by evaluating currently debated policies, such as zoning, as well as price and quantity regulations in housing markets.

• Awarded Best Student Paper Prize by the Urban Economics Association.

• Awarded Best Job Market Paper Prize by the European Economic Association.

• ​​Presented at London School of Economics (2019 UEA Summer School), Washington University in St. Louis (14th Economics Graduate Student Conference), Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (8th Annual Economics Conference), NYU (Applied Micro Lunch).

"The Economic Geography of Apartheid"

with Matthew Sharp (London School of Economics)

• In progress.

• Presented at NYU (Econometrics Lunch).