Rebuild or Relocate? Recovery after Natural Disasters  Job Market Paper

This paper studies the distributional effects of natural disasters and the impact of post-disaster policies. Using flight data and original survey evidence from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, I document that 7% of the population migrated to the mainland U.S. in the aftermath, though many later returned. High migration costs prevented an even larger number from leaving. Those who stayed faced widespread damages to housing, infrastructure, and the local economy. I find that age, wealth, and housing tenure  shaped post-disaster choices: many homeowners with severe property damage defaulted on their mortgages, wealthier homeowners rebuilt with government assistance, and younger renters were most likely to leave the island permanently. These empirical findings inform a dynamic equilibrium model of migration, housing, and infrastructure with heterogeneous households. Homeowners with property damage experience significant welfare losses from direct reductions in home equity and housing consumption, while renters and undamaged homeowners also face welfare declines from infrastructure destruction and through general equilibrium price movements. Local infrastructure investment is a cost-effective policy, due to complementarities with both housing consumption and production. In contrast, rebuilding subsidies for homeowners, though effective in preventing mortgage defaults and mitigating housing shortages, are not cost-effective. Homeowners with property damage value these subsidies below cost because they are not guaranteed and do not provide any payout if the home is foreclosed on or sold. More flexible policies could yield large welfare improvements for similar costs.

Household Climate Finance: Theory and Survey Data on Safe and Risky Green Assets  (Updated September 2024)
with Johannes Beutel, Monika Piazzesi, and Martin Schneider

Spending Responses to High-Frequency Shifts in Payment Timing: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit
with Aditya Aladangady,  David Cashin, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, Katherine Richard, and Claudia Sahm
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol 15 (3), pp.  89–114, August 2023 

This study explores the spending response to tax refunds for Earned Income Tax Credit recipients using a novel dataset combining transaction-based measures of retail spending with administrative IRS data on tax refunds. Our dataset allows us to exploit variation in the timing of EITC refunds, including changes related to the 2017 PATH Act, along with cross-state differences in refund magnitudes to identify spending responses. Results show EITC recipients spend about $0.30 per refund dollar ($1,150 for the average refund) within just two weeks of issuance, suggesting stimulus targeted at this population may provide a quick boost to aggregate demand.

Re-measuring Gentrification
with devin michelle bunten and Benjamin Preis
Urban Studies, Vol 61 (1), pp.  20-39, May 2023

We develop an expectations-based measure of gentrification. Property values today incorporate market participants’ expectations of the neighbourhood’s future. We contrast this with present-oriented variables like demographics. To operationalise the signal implicit in property values, we contrast the percentile rank of a neighbourhood’s average house price to that of its average income, relative to its metropolitan area. We take as our signal of gentrification the rise of a neighbourhood’s house value percentile above its income percentile. We show that a gap between the house value and income percentiles predicts future income growth. We further validate our metric against existing approaches to identify gentrification, finding that it aligns meaningfully with qualitative analyses built on local insight. Compared to existing quantitative approaches, we obtain similar results but usually observe them in earlier years and with more parsimonious data. Our approach has several advantages: conceptual simplicity, communicative flexibility with graphical and map forms and availability for small geographies on an annual basis with minimal lag.

From Transactions Data to Economic Statistics: Constructing Real-time, High-frequency, Geographic Measures of Consumer Spending
with Aditya Aladangady, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, and Claudia Sahm
NBER CRIW Volume: Big Data for 21st Century Economic Statistics, 2022

Migrant Networks and Climate Change
with Emmanuella Kyei Manu

High-frequency Spending Responses to the Earned Income Tax Credit  

with Aditya Aladangady,  David Cashin, Wendy Dunn, Laura Feiveson, Paul Lengermann, Katherine Richard, and Claudia Sahm

FEDS Notes. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2018

The Effect of Sales-Tax Holidays on Consumer Spending

with Aditya Aladangady,  Wendy Dunn,  Laura Feiveson,  Paul Lengermann, and Claudia Sahm

FEDS Notes. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2017

First-Principles Investigation of Structural and Magnetic Disorder in CuNiMnAl and CuNiMnSn Heusler Alloys Shifrah Aron-Dine, Gregory S. Pomrehn, Aurora Pribram-Jones, Kevin J. Laws, and Lori Bassman. Physical Review B 95, 024108, 2017.

High Entropy Brasses and Bronzes - Microstructure, Phase Evolution and Properties Kevin J. Laws, Cody Crosby, Aarthi Sridhar, Patrick Conway, Leah S. Koloadin, Mo Zhao, Shifrah Aron-Dine, and Lori Bassman. Journal of Alloys and Compounds 650, 949-961, 2015.