I am an Associate Professor of Economics at UC Merced and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. I am an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Economics. My research focuses on labor markets, immigration, and the economics of innovation. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from UC Davis and my B.A. from UC Berkeley.
Does the community response to immigration enforcement depend on the operation or on the public attention it receives? I compare heavily Latino-immigrant neighborhoods with nearby neighborhoods around U.S. ICE events. More Spanish-language news coverage produces larger foot-traffic declines. A competing-news instrument based on foreign disasters implies that one standard deviation of coverage reduces foot traffic by 1.6 percent. Arrests explain little, and the response is driven by national rather than local attention.
Hyperscale data centers cost over a billion dollars but employ only dozens of workers. Satellite data show that construction transforms the site, but the increase in nighttime lights fades within five kilometers. Announced projects of similar scale that were never built show no comparable change. Advertised salaries and new-firm registrations do not rise, while hiring and supplier estimates are also near zero but less precise. County data show no consistent growth across related industries, and rent estimates are positive but imprecise.
We estimate the short- and long-run local labor market impacts of the large increase in U.S. imports and exports that occurred over the 1970s.
We estimate the effects of in-utero exposure to a trade embargo on survival and human capital in an import-dependent developing country.
Using a registered pre-analysis plan, we survey college students during California's stay-at-home order to test whether compliance with social distancing requirements depends on primary preferences and characteristics that affect their marginal benefit from doing so.
The extent to which firms respond to labor supply shocks has important implications for local and national economies. We exploit firm-level panel data on product and process innovation activities in the United Kingdom and find that the large, unanticipated, low-skill labor supply shock generated by EU enlargement increased process innovation and reduced product innovation.
A key feature of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is that they increase the size of the market or the scale of operation for workers in some occupations. We model the scale of operation as the limit up to which the production technology displays increasing returns to scale and explore the implications for income distribution and occupational choice.
We focus on a new channel of adaptation to trade liberalization: the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production.
This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of service-producing firms in the U.K.
We study the short-run, causal effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption on the employment and wage distribution.
The productivity gains due to offshoring may, in part, accrue to workers. This paper estimates the magnitude of these gains and compares it to the magnitude of employment loss due to worker displacement.