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 (December 2025)

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.

The Early Career and the Sources of Life-Cycle Hours Growth (with Xiaonan Ma) (March 2026)

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.

Growing up with an Unemployed Mother (with Nataliya Gimpelson) (February 2026)

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)

Wedge-Accounting in Multi-Sector Models (with Eugenio González Flores and Gian Paulo Soave).