Research

Published & Revise and Resubmit

How Antitrust Killed the Movies: Evidence from Paramount 1948

(with F. A. Hanssen) Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Law and Economics.

How much responsibility does the famous 1948 Paramount antitrust decision bear for the dramatic decline in the motion picture industry in the decade that followed? We investigate the one Paramount stricture that applied with time and spatial variation: the forced divestment of studio-owned cinema chains. We find that mandated cinema divestment explains a substantial portion of the decline, while the effects of television (the primary alternative explanation) appear negligible. Ironically, the cinemas that suffered most following Paramount were the small independent theaters that antitrust enforcers had been seeking to protect.
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Minimum Wage Laws and Job Search

(with David Neumark, Christopher Kaiser, Michael D. Farren, and Liya Palagashvili) Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Public Economics.

A large theoretical literature on job search predicts that a higher minimum wage will increase the number of job seekers for affected jobs, which can lead to more job creation and higher employment. This paper uses novel data on job search in all U.S. states to examine the effect of minimum wage increases on the number of job seekers for low-skilled positions. We find no evidence that higher minimum wages increase job search for low-skilled jobs. Instead, the evidence suggests that higher minimum wages decrease the number of workers seeking employment.
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Assessing the Impact of Worker Reclassification: Employment Outcomes Post–California AB5

(with Paola Suarez, Liya Palagashvili, and Christopher Kaiser) Revise and Resubmit at Public Choice.

Worker reclassification policy efforts have sprung up in recent years with the emergence of platform economy companies and concerns about misclassified gig workers. These efforts are aimed at helping more independent contractors become traditional employees, who are legally afforded various employment-based benefits and protections. Our paper provides a novel empirical assessment of reclassification policy in the United States by analyzing the effects of California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), the country’s strictest law for classifying a worker as an independent contractor rather than an employee. We examine the labor market effects of AB5 on labor force participation, overall employment, traditional employment, and self-employment. We find that self-employment and overall employment significantly decreased post-AB5. Our estimates indicate that self-employment fell by 10.5 percent on average for nonexempt occupations, while overall employment fell by 4.4 percent on average for nonexempt occupations. Occupations with a greater prevalence of self-employed workers saw greater reductions in both self-employment and overall employment. We find no robust evidence that traditional employment increased post-AB5. These results suggest that AB5 did not simply alter the composition of the workforce as intended by lawmakers. Instead, our findings suggest that AB5 was associated with a significant decline in self-employment and overall employment for nonexempt occupations in California.
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Understanding Nonprofit and Government Ownership: Evidence from Nursing Homes in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Journal of Law and Economics, Forthcoming.

This paper explores differences in incentives and consequent behavior between for-profit and not-for-profit firms. I investigate a terrible choice nursing homes faced during the pandemic: isolating residents prevents deaths from COVID-19, but increases non-COVID deaths by aggravating mental illnesses such as dementia. I explore how ownership structure led to differences in isolation measures taken and in resultant health outcomes. I model decisions regarding isolation measures as a trade-off between profits and satisfying staff’s demands, with not-for-profit managers more constrained in how they consume profits. The model predicts that not-for-profit facilities will have more restrictive isolation measures and, consequently, lower COVID-19 cases. Using cell phone location data, I find that not-for-profit facilities implemented more restrictive isolation measures during the pandemic and thus had fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, not-for-profit ownership is predictive of substantially more non-COVID deaths, such that they had more total deaths than for-profit facilities.
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Short-Term Rental Bans and the Hotel Industry: Evidence from New York City

(with Sebastian Anastasi, Alexander Marsell, Frank Stephenson, and Gary Wagner) European Journal of Political Economy, 2025.

We examine the gains and involvement of the hotel industry in New York City’s short-term rental ban. Building on capture theory, we document that the hotel industry was better positioned to overcome collective action problems associated with lobbying and spent an order of magnitude more than home-sharing platforms like Airbnb in political contributions, particularly prior to the ban. We find that hotels’ average daily rates increased by $14 to 19 per night, depending on specification, and revenue increased by roughly $2.1 to 2.9 billion over the first eighteen months following the ban. By contrast, the effect on room nights is small and imprecisely estimated, so the revenue increase was mostly due to the increase in room rates.
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Self-Service Bans and Gasoline Prices: The Effect of Allowing Consumers to Pump Their Own Gasoline

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2024.

Most of the world's population lives in countries that ban the self-service sale of gasoline. Causal effects of this regulation can hardly be assessed in these countries due to a lack of policy changes, but a recent quasi-experiment in the state of Oregon allows us to analyze the impact of the ban. From 1992 to 2017, the state of Oregon was one of two U.S. states that banned self-service at gasoline stations. Oregon adjusted regulations at the start of 2018 to allow self-service at gasoline stations in counties with populations below 40,000 individuals. I examine the repeal of this self-service ban and its effects on gasoline prices. I apply a difference-in-differences design using high frequency data of gasoline prices and find that repealing the self-service ban reduced gasoline prices by 4.4 cents per gallon in affected Oregon counties. This effect represents approximately $90 in expected annual savings for a household with three licensed drivers.
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Rural Healthcare Access and Supply Constraints: A Causal Analysis

(with Liam Sigaud, Elijah Neilson, and Markus Bjoerkheim) Southern Economic Journal, 2024.

Certificate-of-need (CON) laws require that healthcare providers receive approval from a state board before offering additional services in a given community. Proponents of CON laws claim that these laws are needed to prevent the oversupply of healthcare services in urban areas and to increase access in rural areas, which are predominantly underserved. Yet, the policy could lower rural access if used by incumbents to limit entry from competitors. We explore the repeal of these regulations in five U.S. states to offer the first estimate of the causal effects of CON laws on rural and urban healthcare access. We find that repealing CON laws causes a substantial increase in hospitals in both rural and urban areas. We also find that the repeal leads to fewer beds and smaller hospitals on average, suggesting an increase in entry and competition in both rural and urban areas.
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ADA to Ph.D.? The Americans with Disabilities Act and Post-Secondary Educational Attainment

(with Nicholas Reinarts) Public Choice, 2023.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 requires employers and universities to provide accommodations to employees and students with disabilities. Previous research on the ADA has focused primarily on labor market outcomes. Yet, little is known about how the ADA affected the educational attainment of people with disabilities. This paper fills this gap by examining the effect of the ADA on the decision-making of disabled Americans regarding post-secondary education. Using data from the CPS, we implement difference-in-differences and synthetic difference-in-differences empirical approaches to estimate this causal effect. We find that the ADA substantially negatively impacted post-secondary educational attainment, which is the opposite of its intended objective.
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Introducing an Index of Rent-Seeking Activity: A Synthetic Matching Approach

(with Elijah Neilson) Public Choice, 2023.

Despite Gordon Tullock’s famous effort to motivate researchers to quantify investments in rent seeking, the empirical measurement of rent-seeking activity remains under-studied. This paper proposes a new estimate of rent seeking by comparing the industrial composition of MSAs that contain a state capital with those of a comparable synthetic match. Each of these synthetic matches are constructed as a weighted average of all MSAs that do not contain a state capital, where the weights are chosen via entropy balancing. This paper offers the first panel estimate of rent seeking in the United States by state and year for the years 2004–2020. We also provide the first industry-specific measures of rent seeking, in addition to aggregate indexes of traditional, in-kind, indirect, and total rent seeking. All measures of rent seeking described in this paper have been made publicly available.
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Estimating the Effect of Rent Seeking on Income Distribution: An Analysis of US States and Counties

(with Stephen Miller) Public Choice, 2022.

Prior empirical research on rent seeking has focused on estimating its effects on overall macroeconomic performance, with few studies attentive to income distribution. This paper expands on existing research by evaluating rent seeking’s effects on Gini coefficients, and income shares at the US state and county levels. We explore county-level panel data from the Census of Employment & Wages, adopting the percentages of workers employed in legal services and local government as proxies for rent seeking. We find that the estimated effects of rent seeking on the income distribution are significant and positive at all levels of analysis. However, rent seeking’s impact on the distribution of income is much more prominent at the state than at the county level. The results also suggest that the effect of rent seeking on the income distribution works by different mechanisms at the county level than it does at the state level.
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Working Papers & Works in Progress

Improving Early-Grade Outcomes Through Teacher Assignment

(with John List and Faisal Kattan).

Using Family, Network and Individual nudges to reduce Social Media Use amongst Adolescents and Improve Mental Health Outcomes

(with John List, Faisal Kattan, Lena Song, and Palaash Bhargava).

Can AI reduce Obesity Rates in Saudi Arabia using just In-time Personalized Nudges trained on High Frequency Calorie Diaries?

(with John List, Faisal Kattan, Mike Price, and Palaash Bhargava) Pilot and Scoping Ongoing.

Understanding Discrimination in College Admissions: A Field Experiment

(with Hugo Vaca Pereira, Liam Sigaud, Patrick Warren, and S. Michael Gaddis) Under Review.

We examine the extent and mechanisms by which race affects the college admissions process. We provide evidence from a field experiment where fictitious applicants request application fee waivers from all university admissions counselors in the United States. White applicants are much more likely to receive a waiver, be informed that the application is free, or receive a request for more information than Black or Asian applicants. Our results contrast sharply with previous evidence from acceptance decisions showing bias in favor of Black applicants. We introduce a model of university pricing and use information from counselors’ LinkedIn and university profiles, along with university characteristics, to test predictions. We find evidence consistent with agent-taste-based discrimination, where biases stem from counselors’ preferences, and profit-maximizing statistical discrimination. Discrimination in university admissions can vary substantially based on the context in which decisions are made.
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Drug Decriminalization, Public Health, and Crime: Evidence from Oregon

(with Liam Sigaud, Elijah Neilson, and Sebastian Anastasi) Under Review.

The war on drugs is widely criticized for failing to achieve its objectives and for its negative collateral effects. We investigate how a stark departure from this approach affects crime. We examine Oregon's Measure 110, a law that eliminated criminal penalties for personal possession of all drugs and increased funding for public health initiatives. Using a synthetic difference-indifferences strategy, we find that Measure 110 caused a 60% reduction in homicides, thereby preventing 72 deaths per year. It also caused a 23% increase in robberies (330 per year) and a 10% increase in burglaries (1,649 per year). We find no evidence of changes in other crimes. Applying standard social cost estimates, we estimate that Measure 110 decreased the net social cost of crime by about $828 million per year.
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The Hidden Subsidy of the Affordable Care Act

(with Liam Sigaud and Markus Bjoerkheim) Under Review.

Under the ACA, the federal government paid a substantially larger share of medical costs of newly eligible Medicaid enrollees than previously eligible ones. States could save up to 100% of their per-enrollee costs by reclassifying original enrollees into the newly eligible group. We examine whether this fiscal incentive changed states’ enrollment practices. We find that Medicaid expansion caused large declines in the number of beneficiaries enrolled in the original Medicaid population, suggesting widespread reclassifications. In 2019 alone, this phenomenon affected 4.4 million Medicaid enrollees at a federal cost of $8.3 billion. Our results imply that reclassifications inflated the federal cost of Medicaid expansion by 18.2%.
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Indoor Vaccine Mandates in US Cities, Vaccination Behavior, and COVID-19 Outcomes

(with Elijah Neilson and Dorothy Kemboi) Under Review.

Many US cities implemented indoor vaccine mandates to incentivize citizens to get vaccinated and reduce the spread of COVID-19. Previous research finds that similar country-level mandates increased vaccine uptake substantially. However, with city-level mandates, unvaccinated individuals could easily travel to neighboring cities without the mandate, whereas it is difficult to travel across country. Thus, the effects of indoor vaccine mandates implemented in US cities on individuals’ decisions to get vaccinated may differ from country-level mandates. This paper offers the first analysis of the effects of city-level indoor vaccine mandates. Using the synthetic difference-in-differences approach, we find that these mandates had no significant effect on COVID-19 cases, deaths, or vaccine uptake in any of the cities. We also compare our findings to the synthetic control and the difference-in-differences estimates and find the same result. Our findings put into question the efficacy of city-level vaccine mandates.
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