Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department 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. My work combines structural estimation with micro and administrative data to study life-cycle labor supply, consumption behavior, and business cycle dynamics.
Contact
Email: pclins@clemson.edu Office: Department of Economics, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634
The permanent-income hypothesis predicts consumption is proportional to permanent income, yet empirical elasticities are far below one.
I provide evidence that this under-response reflects consumption commitments—hard-to-adjust goods that lock households into past choices.
Four facts support this mechanism: consumption elasticity (i) declines with age, (ii) depends negatively on past permanent income growth,
(iii) exhibits path-dependent expenditure composition toward easy-to-adjust goods, and (iv) all path dependences disappear among households
that recently adjusted commitments. I use a quantitative life-cycle model to show that commitments are necessary to generate the age decline
and history dependence. However, commitments are not sufficient to explain the average under-response; bequest motives and late-in-life luxury
consumption are also quantitatively important. The calibrated model matches both micro consumption responses and aggregate wealth inequality.
Hours worked rise sharply in the first decade after labor-market entry.
We show that this growth is primarily an intensive-margin phenomenon driven by human-capital incentives:
about 60% of the increase in cumulative hours reflects longer workweeks among employed workers, not additional weeks worked.
To reach this conclusion, we estimate a life-cycle model with learning-by-doing and on-the-job search using
quarter-since-entry profiles constructed from the NLSY79 and NLSY97. The model replicates the joint dynamics of
hours, wages, employment, and job mobility from the moment workers leave school. In the estimated model, the return
to current hours operates not only through future wages but also through improved job stability and access to better
outside offers. A decomposition of wage inequality shows that the growing covariance between human capital and match
quality accounts for the majority of the rise in wage variance over the first 20 years after entry.
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.
(with Aloísio Araujo, Victor Costa, Rafael Santos, and Serge de Valk)
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026.
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.
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.
