I am an assistant professor of economics in the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, having recently completed my PhD at Cornell University. My areas of interest are Industrial Organization, Environmental and Energy Economics, and Applied Econometrics. My current work focuses on the interaction of electricity policy, firm dynamics, and emissions in China.
Here is a link to my CV
(joint with R.G. Ehrenberg, G.H. Jakubson, M.L Martin, and J.B. Main): "Diversifying the Faculty Across Gender Lines: Do Trustees and Administrators Matter?", Economics of Education Review, Volume 1, Issue 1, February 2012, pages 9-18
(joint with T. Eisenberg, M.T. Wells, and M. Zhang): "Addressing the Zeros Problem: Regression Models for Outcomes with a Large Proportion of Zeros, with an Application to Trial Outcomes", Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Volume 12, Issue 1, March 2015, pages 9-18 (special edition in memory of Theodore Eisenberg)
Missing Data and the Effects of Market Deregulation: Evidence from Chinese Coal Power - revisions requested at the International Journal of Industrial Organization
A series of market reforms were introduced in 2002 in the Chinese wholesale coal power sector. The period immediately after is widely recognized as having had inconsistent service and many blackouts in China, and it is generally accepted that many of the reforms were not fully enacted. Yet, researchers consistently find that these reforms resulted in efficiency gains for power plants. Using new physical and matched financial data, as opposed to only financial data, I find no evidence that there were efficiency gains at the plant-level. I also find that in the aggregate there were large productivity declines over this period. A lack of efficiency gains would also imply that the reforms had no effect on reducing pollution. Any measurable gains in either case are mainly due to input and output price fluctuations.
Welfare Effects of Trade Associations: The Case of the Chilean Salmon Export Industry (joint with Manuel Estay and Debi Prasad Mohapatra) - revisions requested at the RAND Journal of Economics
Winner of the IIOC 2023 Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for the Best Paper in Antitrust Economics
This paper examines the welfare consequences of a trade association in an exporting country on consumers in destination countries. We estimate a structural model of the Chilean Salmon exporting industry that endogenizes firms’ pricing and export decisions. Our results show that the trade association has a strong positive effect on consumer utility and requires higher marginal costs of production, which is consistent with mechanisms of higher quality products and lower trade frictions. We also document robust evidence of collusive activity among trade association members. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that eliminating the trade association would still significantly decrease consumer welfare in destination countries.
Regulatory Distortions and Capacity Investment: The Case of China’s Coal Power Industry (Job Market Paper)
Winner of the EARIE 2019 Young Economist Essay Award (most significant policy contribution)
China's coal electricity generation market features a unique regulatory structure: production is largely determined at the discretion of state planners, but investments in productive capacity can be made privately. Using a newly constructed dataset on the industry, this paper estimates how planners are influencing these investment incentives via a structural model: First, I build a novel discrete choice model of planners' behavior in each market which quantifies their deviations from cost-efficient electricity dispatch policies. I then develop a dynamic discrete choice model of capacity investment with a combination of traits that are uniquely important in the Chinese setting: plants forecast their expected profits in a nonstationary environment that features many large policy shocks, unobserved heterogeneity in investment costs, and market-level heterogeneity in returns to investment. I find that aggregate electricity demand could be met at a roughly 3\% lower cost per unit if plants were assigned production purely based on costs, resulting in additional significant potential gains from reduced carbon emissions. Changes in regulatory treatment result in significant responses from plants: a persistent reduction in a plant's residual allocation by one standard deviation decreases the chance of making major investments by 19-25\%. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that this comes with significant cost consequences for an affected plant by changing its scale. Regulatory distortions come with other, more positive consequences: planning policies are aggressively flattening this market's plant size distribution, which is consistent with concerns about market concentration in the event of electricity deregulation.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Liability Insurance, Market Structure, and Environmental Performance in Pennsylvania Coal Mines (with Joshua Macey)
Self-Bonding in Environmental Liability Insurance Markets (with Terra Baer and Joshua Macey)
Heterogeneous Technologies, Productivity and the State Sector in China (joint with Panle Jia Barwick, Shanjun Li, and Yifan Zhang)
Product Variety, Cost Savings, and Economic Efficiency in WIC (with Barton Willage)
My teaching interests include Industrial Organization, Energy and Environmental Economics, and Applied Econometrics at both the graduate and undergraduate level. I am also available to teach undergraduate courses in Game Theory, Microeconomic Theory, or any methods or statistics class.
Development of Economic Thought and Institutions, Prof. George Boyer (Fall 2018)
Industrial Organization (Undergraduate), Prof. JF Houde (Spring 2017, Spring 2018)
Applied Econometrics, Prof. Doug McKee (Fall 2016), 4.4/5