I am a sixth year economics PhD student at UCLA specializing in applied microeconomics. I am interested in the economics of migration, crime, and trade. I am on the job market in academic year 2020-2021 and am available for interviews.
Research
Job Market Paper: Immigrants, Legal Status, and Illegal Trade
Nearly $2 trillion worth of illegal goods are trafficked across international borders every year, generating violence and other social costs along the way. Some have controversially linked this trafficking to immigrants. But even if true, the appropriate immigration policy response is unclear. In this paper, I use novel data on nearly 10,000 confiscations of illegal drugs in Spain to study how immigrants and immigration policy affect the pattern and scale of illegal drug trafficking. To identify the causal effect of immigrants on trafficking, I construct an instrumental variable that interacts variation in total immigrant inflows into Spain by origin country with the fraction of immigrants inflowing into a province. I find that a 10% increase in the population of immigrants from a given foreign country relative to the mean raises the value of drugs from the foreign country confiscated in a given province by 12%. Moreover, this relationship is driven entirely by immigrants without legal status. To better understand the role of legal status, I exploit an extraordinary regularization of nearly half a million immigrants in 2005. Event study estimates suggest that granting immigrants legal status results in a long-run decline in drug trafficking, corresponding to the acquisition of citizenship by the immigrants.
Publications
How Much Are Car Purchases Driven by Home Equity Withdrawal? Evidence from Household Surveys (with Daniel J. Vine and Karen M. Pence), 2019, Vol. 51, No. 5, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.
Is Underemployment Underestimated? Evidence from Panel Data (with Geng Li), May 2016, FEDS Notes.
Works-in-Progress
Labor Market Hours Constraints and Home Production (with Geng Li)
Health, Fertility, and Productivity: Long-term Effects of a Health and Family Planning Program (with Tania Barham, Randall Kuhn, and Patrick Turner)