Working Papers

1. Consumer Welfare under Individual Heterogeneity (with Charles Gauthier and Sebastiaan Maes) (Revise and Resubmit at the Review of Economic Studies)

   Welfare effects of price changes are often estimated with cross-sections; these do not identify demand with heterogeneous consumers. We develop a theoretical method addressing this, utilizing uncompensated demand moments to construct local approximations for compensated demand moments, robust to unobserved preference heterogeneity. Our methodological contribution offers robust approximations for average and distributional welfare estimates, extending to price indices, taxable income elasticities, and general equilibrium welfare. Our methods apply to any cross-section; we demonstrate them via UK household budget survey data. We uncover an insight: simple non-parametric representative agent models might be less biased than complex parametric models accounting for heterogeneity.

2. Exact Inference from Finite Market Data (With Felix Kubler and Herakles Polemarchakis)

   We give conditions under which an individual’s preferences can be identified with finite data. First, we derive conditions that guarantee that a finite number of observations of an individual’s binary choices identify preferences over an arbitrarily large subset of the choice space and allow one to predict how the individual shall decide when faced with choices not previously encountered. Second, we extend the argument to observations of individual demand. Finally, we show that finitely many observations of Walrasian equilibrium prices and profiles of individual endowments suffice to identify individual preferences and, as a consequence, equilibrium comparative statics.

3. Spheres of Exchange: Restricted Convertibility as Inequality-Aware Market Design (with Yatish Arya)

   Spheres of exchange (SOEs) are institutional arrangements in which goods trade freely within distinct spheres but face formal restrictions on cross-sphere exchange. Most commonly, this restricted convertibility separates subsistence goods from luxury goods. While SOEs are extensively documented by historians and ethnographers, their welfare properties have received limited attention in formal economic models. This paper develops a general-equilibrium framework showing that SOEs can be understood as a form of inequality-aware market design. By restricting the convertibility of luxury wealth into essential goods, SOEs improve access to subsistence goods for poorer agents. We characterize conditions under which SOEs dominate commodity taxation and quantity rationing on utilitarian grounds, and show that combining SOEs with commodity taxation can yield higher welfare than either instrument alone.

4. The Nature of Technological Change 1960-2016 [Recording @ NBER SI Personnel] (With Costas Cavounidis, Vittoria Dicandia, and Kevin Lang )(Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Labor Economics)

   We exploit employment trends to uncover changes in skills’ productivities. Whereas Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) study the degree to which routine-intensity can rationalize employment trends, our reverse approach characterizes the kind of technological change that best explains shifts. We combine a tractable GE model with three DOT (dictionary of occupational titles) editions, the 1960, 1970, and 1980 Censuses, and the March CPS, to estimate changes in the relative productivities of skills. We find ‘skill bias’ - finger-dexterity productivity grew rapidly, while abstract-skill productivity lagged. With substitutability between abstract and routine inputs, these results also explain changing skill use within occupations.

5. A Frequentist Approach to Revealed Preference Analysis (With Agustin Troccoli and Charles Gauthier)

   Classically, testing whether decision makers belong to specific preference classes involves two main approaches. The first, known as the functional approach, assumes access to an entire demand function. The second, the revealed preference approach, constructs inequalities to test finite demand data. This paper bridges these methods by using the functional approach to test finite data through preference learnability results. We develop a computationally efficient algorithm that generates tests for choice data based on functional characterizations of preference families. We provide these restrictions for various applications, including homothetic and weakly separable preferences, where the latter's revealed preference characterization is provably NP-Hard. We also address choice under uncertainty, offering tests for betweenness preferences. Lastly, we perform a simulation exercise demonstrating that our tests are effective in finite samples and accurately reject demands not belonging to a specified class.

6. Obsolescence Rents: Teamsters, Truckers, and Impending Computerization. (with Costas Cavounidis, Qingyuan Chai, and Kevin Lang)(Under Review)

   Technological innovation, such as self-driving trucks, threatens occupations, such as truck drivers, with sudden obsolescence. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing possible obsolescence. The occupation pays ‘obsolescence rents,’ with fewer and older workers remaining in the occupation. We study teamsters at the dawn of the motor truck, current occupations threatened by computerization, and truckers dreading robotic trucks. As predicted, wages in threatened occupations rise, employment falls, and the occupations become ‘grayer’. Older workers become more likely to enter and less likely to exit the occupation than young ones and sometimes even increase in number.

7. Beyond the Mean: Testing Consumer Rationality through Higher Moments of Demand (With Sebastiaan Maes)

   We study a setting where an analyst has access to purely aggregate information about the consumption choices of a heterogenous population of individuals. We show that observing the statistical moments of market demand allows the analyst to test aggregate data for rationality. Interestingly, just the mean and variance of demand carry observable restrictions. This is in stark contrast to impossibility result of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, which shows that aggregate demand carries no observable restrictions at all. We leverage our approach to deliver a characterization of rationality in terms of moments for the common two-good case. We illustrate the usefulness of moment-based restrictions through two applications: (i) improving the precision of demand and welfare estimates; and (ii) testing for the existence of a welfare-relevant representative consumer.

8. Spatial Shocks and Gender Employment Gaps: Evidence from Rising Import Competition in India (With Sarthak Joshi)

   Labor demand shocks unfold unevenly across space. We show that the resulting spatial mismatch can disproportionately impact women’s employment due to gender-based differences in propensity to commute. My empirical strategy uses rising Chinese import competition in the early 2000s to generate variation in the spatial distribution of work within commuting zones in India. Using municipality-level data containing the universe of non-farm jobs, I show that rising imports caused firms to expand in the urban core and contract in the rural periphery. In areas where firms reduced hiring, women’s employment was significantly lower than men’s after 10 years. We show that while men started commuting across the rural-urban boundary to take up jobs in expanding sectors, women either switched to locally available jobs in agriculture or dropped out of the labor force. In line with the fact that women rely more on public modes of transport, We find smaller gender gaps in commuting zones with better bus connectivity at baseline. I find similar negative impacts for women regardless of marital status and education level, suggesting that results are not driven by household-level constraints or increasing demand for skilled labor. My findings are consistent with the presence of gendered commuting frictions stemming from a lack of comfortable and safe commuting options for women in India. In the last part of the paper, We use a spatial general equilibrium model to show that relaxing such gendered commuting frictions would have mitigated the observed decline in female labor force participation in India between 2001 and 2011 by 30%, increasing total output by 0.4%.