Job Market Paper
This paper uses quasi-random assignment to World War II Navy ships during World War II to study how personal networks shape migration patterns. Using newly constructed data on 1.4 million sailors, I measure exposure to geographically diverse shipmates and estimate its impact on post-war migration. A one-standard-deviation increase in a sailor's exposure to shipmates from different states raises the probability of out-migration from his own state by 4-5% by 1950. Effects on directed migration are larger but heterogeneous by destination, increasing moves to fast-growing Census divisions by over 15%. I then estimate a discrete choice migration model with embedded networks, revealing Navy ties encouraged long-distance moves, in part substituting short-distance moves that would have otherwise occurred.Using variation from Navy networks to construct instruments for the probability of migrating, I estimate large returns to network-facilitated migration, suggesting Navy ties enabled moves to higher-opportunity areas.
Publications
with Victor Couture, Jonathan Dingel, Jessie Handbury, and Kevin Williams
Journal of Urban Economics: JUE Insight (2022)
Tracking human activity in real time and at fine spatial scale is particularly valuable during episodes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact. These data cover broad sections of the US population and exhibit pre-pandemic patterns similar to conventional survey data. We develop and make publicly available a location exposure index that summarizes county-to-county movements and a device exposure index that quantifies social contact within venues. We also investigate the reliability of smartphone movement data during the pandemic.
Working Papers
with Victor Couture, Jonathan Dingel, and Jessie Handbury
We investigate whether demographic preferences explain income segregation in shared spaces. To distinguish preferences over demographic composition from preferences over other venue characteristics, we study venue choices within business chains. We find two notable regularities: racial homophily does not vary by income, and preferences for high-income co-patrons are similar across racial groups. These demographic preferences are economically large, explain much of the cross-group variation in exposure to high-income co-patrons, and correlate with movers' neighborhood choices.
with Kaan Cankat (Draft Forthcoming)
How does municipality size affect local government performance? Using newly digitized data and a difference-in-differences design, we examine the impacts of large municipal boundary expansions on municipal finance in the post-war United States. We document that these expansions were significant in magnitude: the average annexation in our sample results in a 20% increase in population. These annexations resulted in modest returns to scale, reflected by lower per capita current expenditures, total municipal employment, and total revenue. In contrast, policing and fire protection demonstrate reductions in spending per capita only in the short run: these decreases disappear in the medium-run as cities increase spending to accommodate annexed territory.