I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Clemson University. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Rochester in 2024.

My research interests are in macroeconomics and labor economics.

Working Papers

Consumption's Response to Permanent Income: The Role of Consumption Commitments (April 2025)

The textbook permanent-income hypothesis predicts that the level of consumption is proportional to the level of permanent income, while, in the data, the elasticity of consumption to permanent income is far below one. I provide evidence that this consumption under-response reflects households being "locked-in" to past consumption choices due to consumption commitments—hard-to-adjust consumption choices that resemble long-term commitments. I document four main new facts that support such "lock-in": (a) the consumption elasticity to permanent income is larger for younger households, (b) it depends on past income trajectories, and (c) it becomes larger after households adjust their commitments; furthermore, I show that (d) those households that have "under-responded" to their income growth skew spending away from hard-to-adjust goods (notably shelter). In a quantitative model, I show that consumption commitments are necessary for life-cycle models to account for all documented facts.

Growing up with an Unemployed Mother (with Nataliya Gimpelson) (November 2025)

We study the long-term consequences of maternal unemployment on children's labor market outcomes. Using the NLSY, we show that children exposed to maternal unemployment during childhood have lower wages and employment probabilities as adults. These effects remain even after controlling for family income, indicating that income loss alone cannot explain the observed scarring effects. Our results suggest that (i) greater parental time availability does not mitigate the damage and (ii) non-income channels play a key role. Finally, we find that the negative effects are concentrated in adolescence, with maternal unemployment during these years leading to earlier labor force entry and reduced educational attainment.

Publications

Inflation Targeting under Fiscal Fragility (with Aloísio Araujo, Victor Costa, Rafael Santos, and Serge de Valk) , forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

We propose a model to study an inflation-targeting regime under a high government debt burden. We assume that an altruistic policymaker chooses debt issuance, inflation, and public expenditure, while private agents dislike inflation and finance the government. We show that equilibrium inflation depends on debt level: (1) on-target when debt is low; (2) above the target when debt is high; (3) either above or on-target in between, a zone that we named fiscal fragility. Equilibrium inflation also depends on the target level: a higher target may improve welfare by preventing fiscal fragility and reducing debt-rollover costs.

The Quality-Adjusted Cyclical Price of Labor (with Mark Bils and Marianna Kudlyak), Journal of Labor Economics, October 2023.

We estimate cyclicality in labor's user cost allowing for cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches and wages that are smoothed within employment matches. To do so, we exploit a match's long-run wage to control for its quality. Using NLSY data for 1980 to 2019, we identify three channels by which recessions affect user cost: It lowers the new-hire wage; it lowers wages going forward in the match; but it also results in higher subsequent separations. All totaled, we find that labor's user cost is highly procyclical, increasing by more than 4% for a 1 pp decline in unemployment.

Work in Progress

Firm Stochastic Discount Factors Over the Business Cycle (with Lorenz Ekerdt and Kai-Jie Wu)

Human Capital, Job Ladders, and Life-Cycle Labor Supply (with Xiaonan Ma). Draft available upon request.