Economic Research

---

Microsimulations

Macroeconomic Agent-Based Model

A macroeconomy simulated with two types of software agents: households that decide whom to buy from and work for, and firms that decide headcount, wages, and prices. This is a Lengnick model, which shows that even without exogenous shocks, recessions can just emerge from economic agents temporarily failing to coordinate with each other. View on Github

Agent-Based General Equilibrium Model

An agent-based model of a general bilateral exchange problem of any A agents and any N goods. This model uses boundedly rational agents, in the sense that the agents iteratively make trades without knowing the optimal quantities that maximize their utility. It can obtain a decentralized, numerical solution to a general equilibrium problem. View on Github

Modeling the Distributional Impact of Treating Employer FICA Taxes as Employee’s Taxable Income

I coded a reform in PolicyEngine’s microsimulation model for a client. The proposal would exempt Social Security benefits from taxation, while treating the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare taxes as additional taxable income for employees. We model its impact on federal deficits and inequality. View on PolicyEngine

---

Working Papers/Works in Progress

The Problem With Historical Instrumental Variables

Many instrumental variable papers that identify treatment variations over long time periods are misspecified. I use difference equations, VAR representations, and Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate this. I also propose a remedial two-stage-least-squares specification to correct for bias. Read more

The Causal Effect of Regulation on Economic Growth: Evidence From the US States

I wrote a paper with Patrick McLaughlin on using state age to estimate how increasing regulation causally affects growth. This project leverages the QuantGov project’s State RegData.

Read more:
Mercatus Working Paper (Dec 20 2024)
SSRN Preprint
Latest Working Draft

How Complex Has the Tax Code Become? A Measure Derived from Tax Liability

I construct a direct empirical measure of tax code complexity that encompasses the incidence of all federal and state taxes and the utilization of all deductions and credits. View on Github

Learning What We Like

A model of preference discovery with Alex Tabarrok.

Social Security: Cost-Benefit Measured as Expected Spending Per Unit of Risk Reduction

I investigate whether various Social Security programs, in conjunction, provide additional value of risk insurance per dollar that is overlooked by separate evaluations of each program. I am using Health and Retirement Study panel data to examine how much the beneficiaries of retirement and disability income payments overlap.

How Monopolistic is iMessage?

To what extent does iMessage confer a monopolistic advantage to Apple? I estimate how much the service changes the demand elasticity for iPhones.

What Is the Cause of Interest Rate Volatility in Interbank Markets?

I demonstrate in this analysis that contrary to conventional wisdom, interest rate volatility isn’t caused by liquidity crunches subsequent to initial public offerings. Read more

Income Mobility and Regulation: Evidence from Canadian Immigrants

Using a panel of measures of immigrant mobility from Statistics Canada and a shift-share instrument, we measure how much liberalization affects immigrants’ economic outcomes. With Vincent Geloso and James Dean.

---

Public Writing

---

Most U.S. Government Borrowing Just Pays for More Borrowing

Nearly 40 percent of U.S. government debt today was issued just to cover interest on previous debt, and this problem is poised to worsen as recent borrowing accrues interest and Congress further cuts revenue. Read more

---

Archive

---

Web Scraper for Subsidized Housing Transaction Data

The Housing Authority’s data on subsidized housing transactions is notoriously difficult to access as the data must be requested by month, each with a separate web form. So I developed a scraper that automatically submits forms and gathers transaction count in each month into one spreadsheet. View on Github

Visualization of the Hong Kong’s Forex Reserves

After a drop in the balances of accounts held at the central bank by commercial banks (aka “Aggregate Balance”) in the summer of 2022, there was trepidation that Hong Kong’s currency peg with the USD would break. In response, I wrote an internal report on why “Aggregate Balance” is insignificant and not worth panicking over. View on Github

Give Public Housing Residents the Right to Buy Their Flat

I submitted a policy memo to the Federation of American Scientists’ call for federal policy ideas for increasing housing supply. By selling public housing units, we can unlock currently non-transferrable land value, increase homeownership, create new wealth that accrues to the poor, improve state and local public finances, free up units under the Faircloth Limit, and most of all, increase housing supply. Read more