Email: [email protected]
Advisor: Yongjoon Park and Lucy Wang
Title of Job Market Paper: "Energy Choice, Air Pollution, and Public Health: Evidence from Turkey’s Natural Gas Transition"
Abstract: In the last twenty years, Turkey has experienced a rapid shift from solid fuels to natural gas, driven by the nationwide rollout of distribution infrastructure. This rollout created wide variation across provinces in both the timing of access and the scale of adoption. I study how this transition affected public health. Using province–year data for 81 provinces from 2011–2019, I examine how increase in residential and industrial natural gas consumption affect mortality and morbidity rates. Relative to prior studies documenting mortality gains from natural gas expansion, this paper makes three contributions. First, it relies on actual consumption data to capture the dynamic, dose–response nature of fuel switching. Second, it broadens the scope beyond mortality to include morbidity, highlighting delayed effects and healthcare responses. Third, it quantifies the full pathway from cleaner fuel use to pollution reduction to health gains. My main identification strategy is a dynamic difference-in-differences with continuous treatment (de Chaisemartin, D’Haultfœuille, and Vazquez-Bare, 2024), which accommodates staggered rollout and heterogeneous effects. To complement the analysis and address potential endogeneity, I also employ two distinct IV approaches. My results indicate substantial health gains. A 10 m³ per-capita increase in residential natural gas consumption leads to a 4.3% drop in cardiovascular mortality and a 3.6% drop in respiratory mortality over two post-adoption years. Hospital admissions fall by 3.0%, with no evidence of change in bed-days. At the national scale, these estimates translate to about 4,000 fewer deaths and 4 million fewer hospital admissions annually for every additional 10 m³ per capita. The analysis reveals that the health improvements are driven primarily by residential natural gas consumption rather than industrial use, as residential adoption directly replaces highly polluting solid fuels and align with measured reductions in PM₁₀ and SO₂ levels. Using a modern continuous-treatment DiD with IV validation, this study strengthens the causal link from residential fuel switching to health. The results highlight substantial short- to medium-term public health gains achievable through cleaner transitional energy sources like natural gas in developing countries, offering critical policy insights for similar energy transition strategies elsewhere.
Email: @email
Advisor: Jamie Mullins
Title of Job Market Paper: "Political Representation, Forest Cover, and Development in Rural India"
Abstract: This paper examines how political representation for historically marginalized communities shapes local economic activity and environmental stewardship. Leveraging the quasi-random rotation of chairperson reservations for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) across 5,000 village councils in Karnataka, India, over five election cycles (1994–2010), I estimate causal effects on satellite-measured night-time lights and forest cover. SC/ST-led councils see higher local economic activity but lower forest cover, with larger effects under ST leadership. These patterns reveal trade-offs between development and conservation and point to the need for policies that enable marginalized leaders to pursue development without depleting the natural resources their communities depend on.
Email: @email
Advisor: Jamie Mullins and Matt Woerman
Title of Job Market Paper: "Weather Shocks, Workfare, and the Farmer Suicide Crisis in India"
Abstract: 300,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives in the past two decades, creating a national crisis. This marginalized population is particularly vulnerable to weather-induced crop failures. I estimate how weather shocks affect suicide rates, and whether government assistance programs can mitigate these effects, among the more than 120,000,000 people in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Using novel village-level data, I find that hot temperatures have a greater effect on farmer suicides than previously believed. I further find that government assistance can greatly reduce the magnitude of these effects. These findings implicate and emphasize the role of government programs to solve this crisis.
Email: @email
Advisor: Emily Wang & Christian Rojas
Title of Job Market Paper: "Quality and Spatial Competition: Evidence from US Restaurants"
Abstract: This paper studies how quality differentiation shapes spatial competition in the U.S. restaurant industry. Using Yelp and TripAdvisor data from more than 30,000 restaurants across over 100 metropolitan areas, we analyze the positioning of high-quality and low-quality establishments within cities. High-quality restaurants are found to be more concentrated near city center and affluent neighborhoods, while low-quality restaurants are more evenly distributed. To understand these patters, we extend the Hotelling framework by introducing consumer heterogeneity. The empirical analysis supports with the model's predictions, indicating that higher population density reduces the average distance of both high-quality and low-quality restaurants from the city center by 14-24%. In contrast, larger quality differences increase dispersion: high-quality restaurants are 42% less likely to locate centrally, while low-quality restaurants become increasingly concentrated in central areas.
Email: @email
Advisors: Nathan Chan and Rong Rong
Title of Job Market Paper: Preference for Redistribution: Does Merit Matter When Winners are Lucky?
Abstract: Experimental studies show that individuals’ preference to redistribute depends on the initial source of inequality, with people being more tolerant of inequality when it is due to merit as compared to when it is caused by luck. In this paper, I show that merit affects redistributive preferences even when it is not the source of inequality. Specifically, I test settings where inequality in bonus arises due to luck, but individuals receive additional information about how meritorious the lucky winners are in comparison to the unlucky. In an online experiment, I use a novel modification of the worker-spectator design, where workers are participants who perform a real-effort task and spectators are third party observers who decide whether and how to redistribute a bonus of $4 between a worker-pair. I design four scenarios by manipulating the source of initial inequality in bonus and the information spectators have about the performance of workers in a pair. I causally show that when spectators are given information about workers’ merit, they redistribute significantly in favor of the meritorious worker irrespective of their luck. That is, merit acts as a normative benchmark for what people consider fair even when it is not the source of inequality. As a secondary contribution, I also examine workers’ belief and their effort in response to the spectator’s redistribution decision. I find that workers systematically underestimated the importance of merit in spectators’ decisions.
Email: @email
Advisors: Jamie T. Mullins and Matt Woerman
Title of Job Market Paper: Powering Progress: Evaluating the Economic and Environmental Impacts of Bhutan’s Rural Electricity Subsidy Program
Abstract: In this paper, I study the economic and environmental impacts of Bhutan’s Rural Electricity Subsidy Program (RESP), launched in 2013 to expand affordable access to clean energy while reducing dependence on traditional biomass fuels. The program provides rural households with the first 100 kWh of electricity per month free of charge, with extra consumption billed at the prevailing block tariff. Using three rounds of the Bhutan Living Standards Survey (2007, 2012, and 2022), I estimate the causal effects of the RESP on household energy consumption, appliance adoption, and environmental outcomes. Using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Event-Study framework, along with entropy balancing, I find that the program led to a decrease in household firewood consumption by 53.14-69.5 percent, with 13.78-19.10 percentage points of households abandoning firewood completely. The decline in aggregate firewood use is driven primarily by households exiting firewood altogether rather than by reduced intensity among continuing users. The adoption of electric appliances accounts for roughly one-quarter of the observed decrease in firewood use, indicating the presence of a substitution effect. Despite substantial reductions in firewood use, I find no statistically significant impacts on local forest-loss rates, which is consistent with existing evidence that household firewood collection is not a primary driver of deforestation. Lastly, these findings suggest the importance of targeted electricity subsidies in promoting clean energy transitions in developing countries.
Email: @email
Advisor: Christian Rojas & Christoph Bauner
Title of Job Market Paper: "Advertising Strategies and Effectiveness of Traditional Advertising under Soda Tax Policy"
Abstract: I estimate the causal effects of Berkeley, California’s soda tax policy, passed in November 2014, on firms’ advertising strategies and advertising elasticity in Berkeley across major diet and regular soda brands. Using weekly sales and advertising spending data from 2014 to 2015, I use a comprehensive sample of products and credible research design employing a combination of a difference-in-differences framework and a border- market strategy to identify causal impacts. While existing literature provides evidence of advertising effectiveness across various products from a marketing perspective, I examine how this effectiveness changes under soda tax policies, a public health tool frequently used to mitigate the health risks of excessive sugar intake from soft drink consumption. I find evidence that the long-run own traditional advertising elasticity for regular soda, which measures the relative change in current and future demand due to changes in own traditional advertising, declined by 0.023, falling from a pre-policy value of 0.014 to a post-policy elasticity of –0.009. This indicates that advertising became not only less effective but potentially counterproductive in the taxed category compared to untaxed beverages. I also find evidence that firms reduced advertising spending for regular soda by approximately 16.4% overall, with declines of 16.1% and 39.2% relative to diet soda and light beer, respectively, in the post-policy Berkeley. Additionally, firms adopted spatial marketing strategies, reducing advertising spending near Berkeley while increasing it in more distant areas. These findings offer new insights into soda tax policies and have important implications for manufacturers’ pricing, profitability and marketing strategies, as well as for policymakers regarding public health outcomes.
Email: @email
Advisor: Jamie Mullins
Title of Job Market Paper: “Effectiveness and Distributional Impacts of Environmental Regulation: Evidence from the National Clean Air Program in India”
Abstract: India launched the National Clean Air Program (NCAP) in 2019 as a major policy initiative aimed at reducing particulate pollution in severely affected cities. This paper evaluates the effect of NCAP on PM2.5 concentrations using a matched, difference-in-differences identification strategy with high-resolution, daily PM2.5 data. I find that between 2021 and 2023, NCAP failed to significantly reduce average PM2.5 levels or the number of days exceeding the Indian guideline for ambient air quality. This null average effect, however, hides substantial heterogeneity. I find that sub-districts that had poorer air quality prior to the start of the program have reduced PM2.5 concentrations by 8 percent under NCAP. I also find that PM2.5 concentrations in wealthier sub-districts have declined slightly, but that PM2.5 concentrations in the poorer sub-districts have increased by an average of 6 percent. These results show that aggregate null effects conceal meaningful heterogeneity: NCAP improved air quality where pollution was most severe but may have worsened conditions for the least affluent.
Email: @email
Advisor: Rong Rong and Nathan Chan
Title of Job Market Paper: "Correcting Second-Order Beliefs Across the Political Divide: Experimental Evidence on Climate Change Beliefs"
Abstract: Misperceptions of what others think are widespread and shape how individuals form their own beliefs and take actions. On polarizing issues, the effect of correcting these misperceptions may depend on the political affiliation. We examine this through a preregistered online experiment on climate change beliefs, a highly polarized issue in the United States. Using incentive-compatible methods, we elicit participants’ own beliefs and their beliefs about others’ beliefs (second-order beliefs). We then introduce randomized information about others' actual beliefs from either a co-partisan or an opposing partisan source, and observe the updated beliefs and pro-climate actions. We find that correcting misperceptions in second-order beliefs affects one's own beliefs and actions about climate change, and the effects depend on whether the individual and the information source are politically aligned. Stronger pro-climate beliefs from co-partisans increase individuals’ own pro-climate beliefs and behaviors, while identical information from opposing partisans generates backlash that reverses the behavioral effects. These results suggest that uniform social information campaigns may have a limited impact on polarized issues. Instead, tailoring social information to match the audience’s political affiliation offers a more promising strategy for improving engagement.