My research revolves around place and opportunity. Having grown up in a rural town in the Appalachian Mountains, then living in Southern California, I noticed an immense difference in how people interact with the economy. My goal is to explore this difference with a hope of finding ways to make prosperity more accessible to people no matter where they live.
Topics: Urban economics, labor economics, health economics
Economic Development Quarterly, 2024
Abstract: Characteristics of sprawl, like decreased social cohesion and lower accessibility to jobs and services, could negatively affect economic opportunity and intergenerational mobility. City-level studies have found mixed results, but neighborhood effects have been largely ignored. This study uses census tract and city-level data in a multilevel model to develop a richer understanding of the scale-dependent relationship between sprawl and intergenerational mobility. The authors found that a 1 standard deviation (SD) increase in sprawl at the tract level is associated with a 0.07 SD decrease in upward economic mobility, while a 1 SD increase in city-level sprawl is associated with a 0.08 SD decrease. Sprawl negatively affects upward intergenerational mobility at the metropolitan level and the census tract level. The negative relationship of economic outcomes to sprawl does not hold for high-income children, indicating that there may be conflicting benefits for different income families. Policy makers should understand these conflicting pressures.
Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2024
Essays in Economic and Business History, 2023
In the early twentieth century, the mining industry was characterized by isolation, dangerous working conditions, employer power, and declining employment. However, miners also enjoyed high earnings, flexible schedules, and company housing. In this article, I explore intergenerational economic mobility for miners’ sons. Using linked full-count US Census data to explore outcomes for miners’ sons compared to other sons, I find that miners’ sons usually do worse than manufacturing workers’ sons but better than farmers’ sons. Successful sons of miners grew up in urban neighborhoods that were mining-dependent, had access to education, and moved from their childhood counties. Sons of miners in the coal industry, which was shrinking, also did worse than sons of miners in the oil industry, which was expanding. This article sheds light on the effect that industry growth and geographic isolation has on intergenerational outcomes.
Applied Geography, 2023
This study examines the mechanisms of spatial variation in intergenerational mobility (IM) in United States (US) counties. We explicitly emphasized the effects of urban space and four aspects of urban sprawl—density, mix of uses, centering, and accessibility—and their interaction with socioeconomic factors. We found that urban sprawl variables did not all affect IM in the same direction, and the magnitude of the effect of one urban sprawl variable depended on other variables. The effects of centering varied: while employment centering negatively affected IM, population centering enhanced IM. Typical livable city indicators of walkability, mixed-use development, and a jobs-housing balance improved IM. Their effects on IM were magnified if either of the other two factors increased. However, the impact of walkability on IM decreased if employment centering increased and vice versa. Urban sprawl variables also indirectly influenced IM through inequality, segregation, social capital, and unemployment. We also found that the Black population share had the largest indirect and total effects on IM, which were spatially stationary across the US, and were mediated by racial segregation, social capital, unemployment, education, and single parenthood. This study has shown that enhancing IM requires more than reducing segregation and increasing density.
Most historical analysis of time-series economic outcomes is unable to include women because most women marry and change their names. The Utah Population Database is a unique dataset that is able to track women in Utah through their life and connect them with their family characteristics. The goal of our research is to study women's occupational mobility, including how it is related to both origin characteristics, like family size, parent occupation, and parental health/early parental mortality, and lifetime characteristics, like spouse’s occupation, spouse’s health, and number of children.
This project examines why children raised in rural areas sometimes appear to experience greater upward intergenerational mobility than children raised in more urban places. I investigate several possible explanations, including geographic mobility: rural areas may not themselves provide greater economic opportunity, but may instead encourage young adults to move to places where opportunity is greater. I also examine whether conventional measures of childhood economic disadvantage mean the same thing in rural and urban communities, where the local income distribution and cost of living differ substantially. The project builds directly on my published work on the geography of intergenerational mobility and is currently nearing submission.
Historical censuses before 1940 do not report individual income, making socioeconomic status difficult to measure in research on historical mobility and inequality. This project develops and evaluates improved measures of occupational socioeconomic status that can be applied to linked historical Census records. The goal is to provide researchers with measures that capture meaningful differences in economic position more accurately than conventional occupational scores. This work contributes both a methodological tool for historical social science and an important input into my broader research on intergenerational mobility. The project was presented at the Gerontological Society of America and is nearing submission. This project could have immense impact if the new measures prove significantly more accurate than other measures.
The creation of LIV Golf provides an unusual setting for studying how different incentive structures affect performance. PGA tournaments only pay for performance, as players do not win money unless they place highly, while LIV players are mainly paid through bonuses that they get whether they play well or not. Although the setting is professional sports, the broader economic question concerns incentive structures in management. I have led the empirical analysis and most of the project development; the paper was presented at the 2025 Southern Economic Association meetings.
This is a large interdisciplinary project that includes researchers from many areas, including the Department of Family and Consumer Studies, College of Health, and the School of Business. The idea of the project was to reduce poverty and increase the middle class by encouraging people who did not collect the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to do so. Preliminary estimates showed that almost 15% of people who were eligible for the EITC did not take it, and these peoples' lives could be greatly benefitted with the extra money. The project tried to connect to people who did not collect the EITC through community health centers. I helped do some preliminary data analysis on who is not collecting the EITC, where they are located, and risk factors for not collecting the refund.
This research was a part of the Department of Economics Economic Evaluation Unit. The Utah Office for Victims of Crime (UOVC) is facing large budget cuts in 2022 and so they hired us to do some cost-benefit analysis on the various services they provide to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Unfortunately, there has been very few studies on outcomes for the funded interventions, so our analysis required interviewing Victims of Crime offices from other states and organizations within Utah to get an understanding of best practices in victims of crime assistance. My role was assisting in the interviews of the 30+ organizations that we talked to, analyzing the data from the UOVC on the organizations they fund, and helping to write a report. The report is forthcoming.
This was a one-semester partially-funded RA position in which I updated the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for Utah for the 20 years between 1997 and 2017. The GPI is alternative measure to GDP for economic well-being of an area. The GPI includes several things excluded from GDP, including externalities from inequality and environmental degradation, unpaid work, and leisure time. Data came from over 15 sources at the state and federal level.
This was a one-semester partially-funded RA position in which I gathered and cleaned government data on labor and output by sector for states for the period from 1963 to 2017.
In this 2-semester internship, I helped the Demography Team to estimate population at the Census-tract level for intercensal years in Salt Lake and Utah Counties, the most populous counties in Utah. We mainly did this by gathering information on new housing construction in propriety GIS files and in real estate market reports. These estimates help many people in local business and government with their planning.
I was a paid undergraduate researcher with Dr. Salehi-Isfahani for several semesters. The goal of the project was to study how Iran's development had been dependent on the increased position and education of women in Iran, and how these trends reacted to the many political upsets in Iran over the last 50 years. My job was to read and discuss Dr. Salehi's work, and to analyze health survey data in Afghanistan as a comparison to Iran.