Working Papers
Accelerated Science: Evidence from Pandemic-Era Economics Research
This paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the production and diffusion of economic research. Using a novel linked dataset that connects NBER working papers to OpenAlex bibliometrics and Altmetric attention traces, I track how pandemic-focused scholarship moved through academic, media, and policy channels. COVID-related papers accumulated citations nearly twice as rapidly in their first two years, moved through publication about six months faster, and received substantially more policy and media attention. These advantages, however, were front-loaded: citation rates converged within five years, and COVID papers were less likely to appear in top journals. Papers released earliest in the crisis captured a pronounced first-mover advantage. Pandemic papers were also shorter, cited fewer references, and scored markedly lower on indices I construct that summarize research documentation, empirical thoroughness, and differentiation within the literature. Those effects are particularly pronounced for the papers released earliest in the pandemic. Together, the results reveal a distinct mode of scholarship defined by speed, salience, and abbreviated execution—an accelerated science that expanded visibility but altered how research was produced and where it was shared.
A Date With Destiny: Relative Age Effects in High School and Beyond
Undergraduate Economics Thesis. 2024
This paper examines the persistence of relative age effects. Using data on academic performance in high school, we investigate whether the well‑documented benefits that students born earlier in the academic calendar receive in kindergarten and primary school persist into adolescence and adulthood. We conclude that relative age has a negligible effect on academic performance in high school and beyond, and potentially turns into an age penalty for older students. Notably, our results suggest that age has a sizable effect on decisions to drop out or go to college.
Beyond Arrow: Revealing True Preferences
Undergraduate Mathematics Thesis. 2024
In this paper, we examine the existence of strict strategy‑proof voting mechanisms. Using Arrow's Impossibility Theorem we prove any rational social choice function that respects Pareto optimality, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and monotonicity must be dictatorial. Next, we use the Gibbard‑Satterthwaite theorem to show that strategy‑proof voting mechanisms are necessarily dictatorial. …
Works in Progress
Overconfidence and Reliance on LLMs
With Don Moore
Large language models present a novel challenge for human judgment: they provide confident-sounding answers across domains while offering little signal about the reliability of their output. Unlike traditional decision aids that demarcate their competence, LLMs rarely acknowledge uncertainty. This creates a distinct environment for studying overconfidence as users must calibrate their reliance on AI assistance without the usual cues about when that assistance is trustworthy. This study examines whether interacting with LLMs systematically affects users’ confidence in their own judgments, and whether users can appropriately discount LLM input when it is unreliable.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of SKY
with Jagpreet Chhatwal, H. Mert Sahinkoc, and William Meyerson
Evidence abounds that our healthcare system faces a healthcare worker mental health crisis. This has prompted hospitals to pursue wellness interventions, but few have gained widespread traction because the well-studied medical benefits of these programs have not been translated into cost-effectiveness assessments. Hospitals wish to understand not just whether interventions improve well-being, but whether they justify their investment. In this paper, we develop a model that translates RCT evidence on well-being interventions into cost-effectiveness assessments for healthcare workers. We then apply this model to a recent RCT evaluating a particular modality of breathwork called the SKY breathing technique.