Research

Publications

• "Suffering in silence: How COVID-19 school closures inhibit the reporting of child maltreatment." Journal of Public Economics, 190 (October 2020), 104258. (with E. Jason Baron and Ezra G. Goldstein) (Working paper on SSRN)

Media coverage: Chalkbeat, CityLab, American Enterprise Institute, The New York Times, Fox News, BuzzFeed News, Scientific American, The Conversation

• "Who responds to changes to the federal adoption tax credit? Evidence from Florida." Southern Economic Journal, 87(2): 483-516. 2020. (with Luke P. Rodgers)

• "Information interventions and postsecondary enrollment: Evidence from Appalachian Ohio." Review of Regional Studies, 51(2): 170-207. 2021.

• "The impact of place-based poverty relief: Evidence from the federal Promise Zone program." Regional Science and Urban Economics, 103735. Available online September 2021. (with Carl Kitchens)

Working Papers

• "Does allowing prospective adoptive parents to compensate birth mothers for adoption-related expenses affect the number of infant adoptions?"

For seven decades, states have passed legislation either enabling or prohibiting prospective adoptive parents from compensating a matched birth mother for some of the costs incurred during the infant adoption process, namely medical, legal, and living costs. All else equal, adoption is a more feasible outcome for birth mothers if they are allowed to be compensated for relevant expenses. In 1940, no state codes contained provisions for adoption compensation. By the mid-1980s, nearly half of states had passed such legislation, and today, 45 states have such laws. Leveraging this variation in state adoption laws governing compensation, I estimate how the allowance of monetary transfers affects the number of infant adoptions in a difference-in-differences framework. Results indicate that the number of private infant adoptions is not affected by the passage of such laws, and estimates are robust across multiple specifications. The findings suggesting that non-fiscal concerns or uncertainty in the matching process may overshadow the potential availability of compensation.

• "Rigged balances and a rigged economy: A look at rent-seeking."

This article considers the biblical warnings of false balances and scales, relating the teachings to the currently pervasive notion of a “rigged” economy. It links this idea of a rigged economic system to an imbalance of power in the political process, vis-à-vis rent-seeking. The article then outlines how rent-seeking undermines notions of fairness and how the well-connected are able to differentially affect consequential policy decisions through access and influence. It suggests that rent-seeking exemplifies a modern-economy analogy to the use of improper scales. The paper then underlines the harm shared among the least-connected, examining the exploitation through a biblical lens. The article concludes with a call for consideration regarding the morality of rent-seeking – to what extent are practitioners morally responsible? It also provides a modest set of proposals to pursue which may remove the incentive to seek rents, and it suggests that Christian economists may link their faith to their research by promoting policies that may mitigate egregious rent-seeking offenses.