Working in Progress

Papers Under Review

The Effects of Dollar General Opening on Next Door Firms (with Amelia Biehl and Juan Sayago) [WP Link]

The 17,000th Dollar General store opened in 2020, as the company, which has locations in 46 states, added 1,000 new stores in 14 months. Dollar General is a low-cost retailer that makes shopping convenient by utilizing small stores, rather than following the traditional big box approach. Using the National Establishment Time Series dataset (NETS) for the state of Florida between 1990 and 2019, we use the difference in timing of Dollar General openings to investigate its effect on small businesses nearby. Specifically, we quantify the effects on nearby firm revenue, employment, and likelihood of exit. The unique nature of the NETS data allows us to focus on the impacts of businesses in narrower setting and determine a treatment group of firms within 0.5-mile radius, rather than using pre-defined geo-political boundaries. Our results suggest Dollar General can drive some firms out of business but provide positive spillovers in terms of revenues and employment for the ones that survive. These results are heterogenous across industries and retail subgroups.

Differential Effects of Enrollment in Online Classes on Graduation Rates (with James Higgins* and Clarisse Halpern*)

This study examines the impact of online enrollment on undergraduate graduation rates across various demographic groups. Utilizing data from the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and U.S. Census Bureau from 2012 to 2018, we document the heterogeneous effects of online enrollment on graduation rates in the United States. Our results show that graduation rates are not affected by the simple offering of classes but by the intake amount. In particular, our results suggest that women, White and Asian student population benefit the most from this modality. The results underscore the need for higher education institutions to consider the diverse impacts of online learning modalities on different student demographics.

Tax Incentives and Local Business Ownership: Evidence from the Florida Enterprise Zone Program (with Jamie Pavlik and Juan Sayago) [WP Link]

The effect of place-based policies like enterprise zones has long been debated. Recent literature finds that even if the short-run effects of such policies are positive, the long-run effects tend to dissipate to zero. We focus on why this is the case. We argue that the lack of long-run effects is the failure to attract locally owned small businesses. We study the effects of enterprise zone designation on local business sorting in Florida. Utilizing a regression discontinuity design and establishment level NETS data, we find that enterprise zone designation reduces the likelihood of single-establishment local ownership but it attracts firm headquarters.

How Hot is too Hot? An Analysis of Housing Markets in the U.S. (with Andrea Santana* and Travis Jones)

This paper tests for the existence of a housing Kuznets curve by examining the relationship between the monthly National Association of Realtor’s Market Hotness Index metric and real median listing prices for homes in 1612 counties in the U.S over the period 2017-2024. Economic theory suggests that there should be a correlation between market hotness and housing prices, but the shape of this relationship – linear or polynomial – is an empirical question. Our results illustrate that there is an N-shaped relationship between market hotness and median listing prices and that movements in the supply side (median days on market) are leading the changes in prices rather than movements on the demand side (viewers per property). We also document that this relationship is more prominent in urban homes and those in the second and fourth price quartiles.

Working Papers / Work in Progress

(drafts available upon request)

An Examination of Small Business Resiliency Under Significant Negative Economic Shock (with Zoey Reed-Spitzer*, Tom Smythe, Shelton Weeks)

The Economic Geography of American Artists, Postbellum to World War II (with Sara Mitchel and Lukas Kuld)

The Economics of Hurricane Impacts in Florida (with Rushaine Goulbourne and Amanda Ross)

Identification and Concentration of Same-Sex Households (with Mia Goodnature, Adam Nowak and Patrick Smith)

Unpublished Manuscripts

Does Corruption Impact the Informal-Formal Sector Wage Gap? Evidence from Brazil (with Jamie Bologna) [WP link]

This paper investigates the relationship between political corruption and the informal-formal sector income gap. We focus on a sample of 476 randomly selected municipalities in Brazil, and combine individual level Census data with measures of municipal corruption. We first document the upward pressure corruption puts on the informal-formal income gap. We then utilize a measure of mismanagement by governmental officials as an instrument for corruption to show that these results are robust to plausibly exogenous variation in corruption. When disaggregating the results, we show that the effect of corruption is heterogeneous across industries, with a significant impact on the construction industry in particular.