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 how the measured importance of initial conditions to lifetime inequality depends on when
measurement begins. We estimate a life-cycle model with human-capital accumulation and frictional
labor markets using data that track workers from labor-market entry. Initial conditions explain 26
percent of lifetime earnings inequality at entry, but 46 percent five years later. We then decompose
the increase in cross-sectional wage inequality over the early career and find an important role for
sorting between human capital and match quality: workers with higher human capital increasingly hold
better matches over the first years of work. In the model, this sorting arises because skill
accumulation affects labor-market outcomes beyond wages, raising job-finding rates, lowering
separation risk, and shifting workers toward better offer distributions. Our results imply that
decompositions that start measurement years after labor-market entry partly reclassify inequality
produced during workers' early careers as predetermined heterogeneity.
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.
(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.
