About

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Virginia's Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. I am also a research affiliate at IZA and the Comprehensive Income Dataset Project. My research interests lie in labor and public economics, focusing on labor market institutions, wage inequality, and the impact of social policies on economic outcomes.

Research topics

• Economics
• Economic growth
• Labour economics
• Public economics
• Business
• Accounting
• Operations management
• Finance
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Homelessness and the Persistence of Deprivation: Income, Employment, and Safety Net Participation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Homelessness and the Persistence of Deprivation: Income, Employment, and Safety Net Participation

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-04-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Homelessness is arguably the most extreme hardship associated with poverty in the United States, yet people experiencing homelessness are excluded from official poverty statistics and much of the extreme poverty literature. This paper provides the most detailed and accurate portrait to date of the level and persistence of material disadvantage faced by this population, including the first national estimates of income, employment, and safety net participation based on administrative data. Starting from the first large and nationally representative sample of adults recorded as sheltered and unsheltered homeless taken from the 2010 Census, we link restricted-use longitudinal tax records and administrative data on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicare, Medicaid, Disability Insurance (DI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), veterans’ benefits, housing assistance, and mortality. Nearly half of these adults had formal employment in the year they were observed as homeless, and nearly all either worked or were reached by at least one safety net program. Nevertheless, their incomes remained low for the decade surrounding an observed period of homelessness, suggesting that homelessness tends to arise in the context of long-term, severe deprivation rather than large and sudden losses of income. People appear to experience homelessness because they are very poor despite being connected to the labor market and safety net, with low permanent incomes leaving them vulnerable to the loss of housing when met with even modest disruptions to life circumstances.

  PublisherDOI

• Certification and Recertification in Welfare Programs: What Happens When Automation Goes Wrong?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Certification and Recertification in Welfare Programs: What Happens When Automation Goes Wrong?

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-07-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How do administrative burdens influence enrollment in different welfare programs?Who is screened out at a given stage?This paper studies the impacts of increased administrative burdens associated with the automation of welfare caseworker assistance, leveraging a unique natural experiment in Indiana in which the IBM Corporation remotely processed applications for twothirds of all counties.Using linked administrative records covering nearly 3 million program recipients, the results show that SNAP, TANF, and Medicaid enrollments fell by 15%, 24%, and 4% one year after automation, with these heterogeneous declines largely attributable to crossprogram differences in recertification costs.Earlier-treated and higher-poverty counties experienced larger declines in welfare receipt.More needy individuals were screened out at exit while less needy individuals were screened out at entry, a novel distinction that would be missed by typical measures of targeting which focus on average changes overall.The decline in Medicaid enrollment exhibited considerable permanence after IBM's automated system was disbanded, suggesting potential long-term consequences of increased administrative burdens.

  PublisherDOI

• Certification and Recertification in Welfare Programs: What Happens When Automation Goes Wrong?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Certification and Recertification in Welfare Programs: What Happens When Automation Goes Wrong?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Certification and Recertification in Welfare Programs: What Happens When Automation Goes Wrong?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Change in Poverty from 1995 to 2016 Among Single Parent Families

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Change in Poverty from 1995 to 2016 Among Single Parent Families

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Change in Poverty from 1995 to 2016 among Single-Parent Families

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2022-05-01 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing the recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. Using the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID), we correct for measurement error in survey-reported incomes, focusing on single-parent families from 1995 to 2016. Our preferred estimates indicate that single-parent family poverty declined by 62 percent over time, while it fell by only 45 percent using survey data alone. Moreover, survey-reported deep poverty among single-parent families increased over time, while it fell using the CID.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bruce Meyer

  59 shared

• Carla Medalia

  United States Census Bureau

  11 shared

• Kevin Corinth

  IZA - Institute of Labor Economics

  9 shared

• Matthew Stadnicki

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Angela Wyse

  4 shared

• Alexa Grunwaldt

  4 shared

• Alan Plumley

  3 shared

• Grace Finley

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2015

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2011

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2009