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.
We study the long-term consequences of maternal unemployment for children's labor-market outcomes. Using linked
mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we document that children exposed to longer
maternal unemployment spells have lower wages and employment probabilities as adults. We then unpack these
relationships and investigate mechanisms. First, we show that these negative exposure effects are concentrated
in adolescence. Second, we explore how mothers change their investment inputs. Third, we highlight how these
relations persist after conditioning on family permanent income, suggesting mechanisms beyond income loss.
Fourth, we use placebo tests and bunching diagnostics to address selection concerns. Overall, our results
provide new evidence on the anatomy of the intergenerational impacts of unemployment and suggest important
roles for non-income aspects of unemployment.
We study the years immediately following labor-market entry and their implications for measuring and understanding
lifetime inequality. We estimate a life-cycle model with human-capital accumulation and frictional labor markets
using data that follow workers from labor-market entry. We show that decompositions initialized several years
after entry substantially overstate the role of initial conditions by reclassifying outcomes generated during
the first years of work as initial heterogeneity. We also decompose the rise in early-career wage inequality
and find an important role for sorting between human capital and match quality, as workers with higher human
capital increasingly obtain better matches. This sorting arises because human capital raises job-finding rates,
lowers separation risk, and shifts workers toward better offer distributions, generating incentives to work
beyond those arising through wages alone.
Earnings Cuts Upon Transitions and the Role of Stepping-Stone Employers
This article studies the prevalence and drivers of earnings cuts upon job transitions (ECUTs) in the U.S. labor market.
We argue that a significant fraction of ECUTs reflect strategic behavior: workers accept lower initial earnings to join
stepping-stone employers -- firms whose departing workers systematically move to higher-paying employers. Using linked
administrative data, we show that workers accept larger earnings cuts to join firms with higher upgrading rates and
subsequently experience greater wage growth and upward mobility. Using a unique linked administrative-survey dataset,
we identify workers' reported motivations for transitions, finding that 29% of transitions motivated solely by
pecuniary reasons involve ECUTs and that these workers disproportionately target stepping-stone firms and achieve
higher future earnings growth. To formalize this mechanism, we develop a random search model in which employers differ
in both the quantity and quality of job-offer arrival rates. The quantitative results suggest that stepping-stone employers,
particularly those with higher-quality offer arrival rates, provide an important pecuniary motivation for ECUTs.
(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.
in Antonio Spilimbergo and Krishna Srinivasan (eds.),
Brazil: Boom, Bust, and the Road to Recovery, IMF, March 2019.
[Book]
After ranking among the world’s top-performing economies for most of the twentieth century,
Brazil entered a prolonged period of low and volatile growth in the early 1980s that shows
no sign of ending. This dramatic slowdown reflects a large decline in labor-productivity
growth, symptomatic of the Brazilian economy’s inability to move enough workers into
higher-productivity jobs despite rising levels of schooling. This chapter discusses three
possible explanations for this poor performance: the failure to complete market-oriented
reforms, the adoption of industrial policies focused on protecting inefficient incumbents,
and the expansion of policies favoring small, unproductive firms. It concludes by
highlighting six policy areas for restoring sustained growth.
Work in Progress
Firm Stochastic Discount Factors Over the Business Cycle
(with Lorenz Ekerdt and Kai-Jie Wu)
Wedge-Accounting in Multi-Sector Models
(with Eugenio González Flores and Gian Paulo Soave)
