Economic research

News flash! As of November 2021 I am working as an economist at Amazon, supporting the Worldwide Grocery Stores finance leadership team. I’ll be working on expanding my data science tool kit and learning about physical retail. The purpose will be the same as my policy work: use causal inference to understand economic behavior and to support evidence-based decision making by leaders.

I’ll keep updating this site, but it’ll remain mostly focused on my public policy analysis and teaching.

Before shifting to Amazon, I was an Economist at the RAND Corporation. I also taught cost-benefit analysis to masters and doctoral students at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Before grad school I worked as a software systems engineer, supporting the data infrastructure behind a system that delivered health information and video content to TVs in the rooms of hospital patients (before we had smartphones for that).

In my policy-focused work I study the economics of public policies in education, health care, household finances, and other areas. I’m fascinated by small policy decisions that leaders are forced to make—that tend to be incremental, hard to change, and have huge impacts over years or decades. These decisions often create sharp boundaries that offer opportunities for natural experiments, given the right data. I’ve found that telling the story of how these boundaries divide individuals and institutions—creating parallel worlds—is a great way to focus attention on incremental policy decisions and the potential for bigger, more transformational changes.