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.
How much of lifetime inequality is determined by the time workers enter the labor market? The answer depends on when measurement begins.
We estimate a life-cycle model with endogenous hours, learning-by-doing, match quality, and frictional labor markets, tracking workers
from labor-market entry. Initial conditions explain 26 percent of lifetime earnings inequality at entry, but 46 percent five years later,
implying that decompositions that start years after entry partly reclassify inequality produced during workers' early career as predetermined
heterogeneity. Most of this early-career rise in earnings inequality reflects sorting: human capital and match quality become increasingly
correlated over the first years of work. Sorting arises because human capital affects labor-market outcomes beyond wages -- it raises
job-finding rates, lowers separation risk, and shifts workers toward better offer distributions -- so skill accumulation translates
endogenously into better matches. The early career is therefore not a prelude to the life cycle; it is a period in which a substantial
share of lifetime inequality is produced.
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.
