Papers

This paper explores the role of social interactions on a youth’s decision to begin smoking. Specifically, we estimate the effect of cigarette taxes during early childhood on beginning smoking later in adolescence in a discrete-time hazard model.

In this paper, I estimate the effect of education spending on district-level student outcomes in 24 states by leveraging changes in revenue driven by property value variation. I find that a 10 percent increase in spending improves graduation rates by 3 to 5 percentage points and student test scores by 0.07 to 0.09 standard deviations. This suggests that market variation in property values affects student outcomes through existing school finance formulas.