Working Papers
Upcoming presentations: Brown University PhD Conference (May '25), Boston College PhD Conference (May '25), Society of Economics of the Household (June '25)
Past presentations: FRB Boston (July '24), FRB Philadelphia (Sept. '24), Boston University (Nov. '24), Bentley University (Dec. '24), PhD-EVS (Jan. '25), Midwest Economics Association (March '25), North East Universities Gender Day (April '25)
Why do some occupations pay increasingly more than others over time? To answer this question, I combine hand-collected historical labor market data with a theory-guided accounting framework that allows me to decompose occupational wage inequality into two groups of explanations: productivity and rent sharing. In order to implement this decomposition, I use an equilibrium model of search and matching to derive a mapping from unobserved wage markdowns due to search frictions into a set of measurable labor market statistics for each occupation. I find that productivity, as opposed to rent sharing, explains most of the occupational wage inequality, both in the cross section and over time.
Publications
This paper successfully replicates Autor et al. (2008) and extends their analysis through 2022. The extension to an additional 17 years of analysis underscores the original finding that rising wage inequality was not an episodic event of the 1980s. That being said, overall 90/10 inequality and the college wage premium have plateaued since 2005. Despite overall inequality plateauing, uppertail 90/50 inequality has continued to increase since 1980 for both men and women. I also find that the composition-adjusted real wages of high school dropouts has caught up with high school graduates in the last decade. Between 2012 and 2022, high school dropouts saw larger real wage gains than any other education group. The combination of these findings is consistent with rising polarization in which employment and wages expand for high-wage and low-wage work.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been tasked with quickly devising a climate change strategy that helps its members meet collective climate change and development goals while maintaining financial stability. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework of the ‘macro-critical’ nature of climate change and use that framework to examine the extent to which the IMF has incorporated the macroeconomic aspects of climate change in recent years. We deploy textual analysis algorithms to perform a baseline analysis of the extent to which the IMF’s main bilateral surveillance activities—Article IV reports and Financial Sector Assessment Programs (FSAPs)—have focused on climate risks between 2017 and 2021. We find that IMF surveillance activity has paid little and uneven attention to climate risks in Article IV reports, and even less so in FSAPs. However, recent Article IV and FSAP assessments have piloted climate risk analyses that present an opportunity to be expanded and incorporated systematically. The analytical framework, baseline analysis, and methodology will allow future analysts to monitor IMF climate performance over time.
Work in Progress
with Vikram Dixit