Research
My research interests fall in the field of empirical macroeconomics, with particular interest in natural resources and economic inequalities.
View my Google Scholar page here
Working Papers
Unequal ground: the impact of natural resource booms on income inequality in the US --- Revise & Resubmit [View]
We study the impact of oil booms on state-level income inequality. We construct measures of pre-tax money income inequality at the state level using micro data from the Current Population Survey. We find that a $10 increase in oil price increases the 90/10 ratio of pre-tax income by 3.8 percentage points in states with high levels of oil endowments per capita. The increase in inequality is attributed to increased income of households at the top of the income distribution, driven by a disproportionate increase in investment income.
Work in Progress
Measuring inequality in real time (with Jacob Robbins, Richard Campbell, and Shogher Ohannessian) [View]
Project funded with a grant from Washington Center for Equitable Growth
In this project, we are using a novel real-time data from Earnest Research to estimate consumer spending inequality. The data set contains information on a panel of 6 million households that we use to construct a distribution of consumer spending that can be updated in near real time with a delay of just one week.
Do Oil booms leave women behind?
Little is known about whether the positive labor market effects of hydrocarbons booms and their spillover effects benefit men and women in the labor market equally. We are using restricted household data for the period 1969 – 2019 to assess the impact of oil and gas booms on female labor supply and gender employment and earnings gap.
Published Papers
Fiscal response to foreign aid: does the persistence of aid matter? (2022) Journal of African Economies.
The effects of permanent and temporary aid on fiscal decisions: evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (2021) Journal of International Development.
Giant Oil Discoveries and Chinese State Financing: National and Subnational Level Analyses (2021) Journal of Extractive Industries and Society (With Shogher Ohassanien)
More oil, more or less taxes? New evidence on the impact of resource revenue on domestic revenue efforts (2020) Resources Policy.
Did 270 billion dollars from China help stabilize business cycle fluctuations in recipient countries? (2020) Review of International Economics (With Georgios Karras)