Speed (joint with Victor Couture and Gilles Duranton)

Abstract:
We investigate the determinants of driving speed in large us cities. We first estimate city level supply functions for travel in an econometric framework where both the supply and demand for travel are explicit. These estimations allow us to calculate a city level index of driving speed and to rank cities by driving speed. Our investigation of the determinants of speed provide the foundations for a welfare analysis. This analysis suggests that large gains in speed may be possible if slow cities can emulate fast cities and that the deadweight losses from congestion are sizeable.

Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy

Jobless Recoveries and the Revolving Credit Revolution

Abstract:

Access to revolving credit more than doubled between 1983 and 1992 among both employed and unemployed households, and new evidence suggests that close to 20\% of unemployed households use revolving credit to replace lost income. Labor markets have also experienced sluggish recoveries following the 1991, 2001, and 2007 recessions. These two facts motivate the following question: how has access to `on-demand’ credit changed the way labor markets respond to downturns? By answering the above question, my contribution to the literature is to provide both the measurements and the theoretic framework necessary to quantify the supply side of jobless recoveries. After measuring the interaction between job loss/credit markets and describing the innate endogeneity associated with any reduced form answer, I build a model that features risk averse agents who face both search frictions in the labor market and the credit market. The model mechanism is that easy credit conditions provide a safety net which incentivizes agents to search for better-paying but scarcer jobs. While this is welfare improving, the side effect is joblessness. Following a downturn, I find that an economy with easy credit access experiences a 10\% larger drop in employment per capita compared to an economy in which credit is tight (e.g. a 2.2\% drop in employment per capita with easy credit access versus a 2\% drop with tight credit access).

Pessimistic Optimal Choice for Risk-averse Agents

The Political Polarization of America’s Physicians

TBA

Mediation and Peace (with Johannes Horner and Massimo Morelli)

Abstract:
This paper applies mechanism design to con ict resolution. We determine when and how unmediated communication and mediation reduce the ex ante probability of conflict in a game with asymmetric information. Mediation improves upon unmediated communication when the intensity of conflict is high, or when asymmetric information is significant. The mediator improves upon unmediated communication by not precisely reporting information to conflicting parties, and precisely, by not revealing to a player with probability one that the opponent is weak. Arbitrators who can enforce settlements are no more effective than mediators who only make non-binding recommendations.