Working Papers
“Wages, Taxes, and Labor Supply Elasticities: The Role of Social Preferences”, with Janjala Chirakijja, March 2025.
Paper (SSRN)
We show that social preferences (e.g. warm glow or spite) towards tax-funded government expenditures induce differences between the wage and net-of-tax rate elasticities of labor supply in canonical models. In a large-scale vignette experiment in the US, we find that wage elasticities of labor supply are meaningfully larger than their net-of-tax rate counterparts, consistent with positive social preferences. We show relevance for real labor market decisions by building on an existing meta-analysis of the elasticity of taxable income. Hence, models calibrated using net-of-tax rate elasticities when wage elasticities are more suitable understate the labor supply response of individuals.
“Redesigning Jobs by Automating Disfavored Tasks Benefits Workers: Field Evidence”, with Ivan Png, December 2023.
Paper (SSRN)
We investigate how automation of disfavored tasks enables the redesign of jobs to benefit workers. Conventionally, cashiers scan purchases and collect payments. A supermarket chain progressively converted stores to a scan-only checkout format which shifted the task of collecting payments to customer self-service. Vignette experiments reveal that cashiers valued the new scan-only job design at 1.5-7.3 percent of wages. The scan-only job design reduced cashiers’ heart rate by 3.5 percent. Cashiers at converted stores more strongly preferred the new job design and were more risk averse as compared to those at unconverted stores.
“The Riskiness of Owning Versus Renting Housing”, with Lee M. Lockwood, Scott R. Baker, and Lorenz Kueng, October 2019.
Homeowners and renters have mirror-image exposures to the substantial risks in housing prices. The costs of these exposures depend crucially on their correlations with other important exposures in household portfolios. Using over 70 years of data on local markets in the U.S., we find that rents and home prices are strongly positively correlated with wages at all horizons. As a result, renting insures earnings risk, and—contrary to widely-held views—for many households owning is much riskier than renting. Combined with evidence that many households view ownership of a home as a particularly safe asset, our findings suggest that the efficiency costs of the substantial tax preferences for owner-occupied housing are greater than previously thought.
Publications
The Mortality Effects of Winter Heating Prices, with Janjala Chirakijja and Seema Jayachandran, The Economic Journal, 2024, 134(657): 402–417.
Deskilling Technology Affords Work Amenity, Increases Labor Supply, with Ivan Png, Strategic Management Journal, 2026, 47(2): 364-389.
“The Effect of Child Support on Fathers’ Labor Supply“, February 2025, accepted at Journal of Labor Economics.
Work in progress
“The Effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on Local Area Economic Outcomes: Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”.
“The Effect of Seasonal Unemployment on Substance Use”, with Jason Ward.