Hello!

I am a PhD candidate in economics at Yale University. My research is in health economics and industrial organization. I study the design of public payments in health care markets.

I am on the 2026–2027 job market. In my job market paper, I find that hospital obstetric units in Arkansas provide substantial value, mostly by improving mothers’ access to care, and I evaluate payments aimed at keeping them open.

Take a look at my research statement, teaching statement, and CV.

Research

Job Market Paper

• The Value of a Hospital Obstetric Unit: Access, Costs, and Health PDF

  Abstract

  Rates of OB provision, hospitals’ decisions to operate obstetric (OB) units, are lower among rural hospitals than urban hospitals and declining overall. I study how OB provision affects access to care, the costs of delivering care, and maternal and infant health. Using data on births and medical claims, I estimate a model of the hospital OB care market in Arkansas. I find that OB provision benefits mothers substantially by giving them access to more options and shortening travel distances, while its effects on health and variable costs are small and mixed in sign. The average OB unit generates a positive externality worth $104 per Arkansas birth, mostly driven by access to care. I evaluate an Arkansas policy that raises Medicaid prices, which keeps OB units open when their costs go up. The policy’s benefit is 1.0 to 1.5 times its cost. Alternatively, a flat subsidy to OB hospitals achieves the same goal more cost-effectively, with a benefit 1.2 to 4.2 times its cost.

Working Papers

• Redesigning Graduate Medical Education Payments: The Role of Residency Caps PDF

  Abstract

  Physicians in the U.S. must complete graduate medical education (GME) by training as residents in teaching hospitals. Teaching hospitals receive GME payments from Medicare, with each hospital assigned a cap on its subsidized residents. About half of teaching hospitals exceed their caps and thus receive no additional payments for training more residents. I study whether GME payments can be redesigned to increase the number of residents by redirecting payments from over-cap to under-cap hospitals. Instrumenting for under-cap status using changes in hospital size since the caps were assigned, I find that under-cap hospitals’ resident counts respond to payments with an elasticity of 0.74, while over-cap hospitals have no response. My estimates suggest that reducing over-cap hospitals’ payments by 25% and transferring the savings to under-cap hospitals would lead to 3,700 more residents without any change in government spending. These gains are proportionally larger in rural areas, which face more severe physician shortages.

• Incidence of Drug Price Regulations PDF
  with Genna Liu

  Abstract

  Prescription drug prices are determined through a chain of interactions among manufacturers, insurers, and consumers. A regulator seeking to lower drug prices must choose which point in the chain to regulate and which drugs to target. How are the effects of drug price regulations distributed among market participants, and how does that guide a regulator’s preferred choices? We develop a model of a drug market with rebate bargaining and community-rated premiums. On the one hand, a net price ceiling transfers surplus from manufacturers to insurers. On the other hand, a copay cap reaches drug users directly, and insurers and manufacturers split its cost according to bargaining power. Beyond that, consumers are affected only through premiums, which only move when drug users are marginal enrollees. A consumer-welfare-maximizing regulator should cap copays, while a spending-minimizing regulator can use either instrument. Copay caps should target drugs with high out-of-pocket prices, many users, and elastic utilization. Net price ceilings should target drugs with high net spending. Applied to insulin in Medicare Part D, the model implies that Medicare’s $35 insulin copay cap raised fills by 3%, at a cost borne by insurers and manufacturers rather than by other consumers.

Publications

• High-Frequency Location Data Show That Race Affects Citations and Fines for Speeding (2025) Journal
  with Pradhi Aggarwal, Alec Brandon, Ariel Goldszmidt, Justin Holz, John List, Ian Muir, and Gregory Sun
  Science, 387(6741), 1397–1401

  Abstract

  Prior research on racial profiling has found that in encounters with law enforcement, minorities are punished more severely than white civilians. Less is known about the causes of these encounters and their implications for our understanding of racial profiling. Using high-frequency location data of rideshare drivers in Florida (N = 222,838 individuals), we estimate the effect of driver race on citations and fines for speeding using 19.3 million location pings. Compared with a white driver traveling the same speed, we find that racial or ethnic minority drivers are 24 to 33% more likely to be cited for speeding and pay 23 to 34% more money in fines. We find no evidence that accident and reoffense rates explain these estimates, which suggests that an animus against minorities underlies our results.

Teaching

Yale University

• ECON 159: Game Theory Final Exam Review
  Teaching Assistant to Prof. Benjamin Polak (Fall 2025)

• ECON 121: Intermediate Microeconomics
  Teaching Assistant to Prof. Daniel Hauser (Spring 2025)

• ECON 115: Introductory Microeconomics
  Teaching Assistant to Prof. Cormac O’Dea (Spring 2024, Fall 2024)

• ECON 121: Intermediate Microeconomics
  Teaching Assistant to Prof. Evangelia Chalioti (Fall 2023)