Working papers

  • "Language, Identity and Ethnic Cohesion in Schools" [Link] (with Pepi Pandiloski) Job Market Paper
    Abstract Building social cohesion in diverse societies presents a significant challenge, one that is further compounded by linguistic diversity. This study investigates how language and identity impact cohesion built through inter-group contact. The setting is three high schools in Macedonia that segregate students by ethnicity. We randomly assign students to complete cooperative tasks with a co-ethnic or cross-ethnic partner. Within cross-ethnic pairs, shared language skills are random, conditional on observable baseline skills. Inter-ethnic contact enhances social cohesion without a statistically significant effect on productivity in a cooperative video game. The cohesion measures strongly correlate with the level of shared language skills within cross-ethnic pairs. Using propensity re-weighting, we find these correlations reflect both match effects (i.e. it is useful to have shared language skills) and underlying heterogeneity. The existence of match effects suggests room for policy to improve cohesion at a relatively low cost. Cohesion outcomes increase sharply when an individual has a cross-ethnic partner who can communicate in the focal player's home language. There does not appear to be a 'backlash' effect, and if anything speaking a neutral language is worse than using the other player's home language.

  • "Social Learning in Segregated Societies" (with Pepi Pandiloski) Draft available upon request

  • "Costly withdrawals reduce future college going: Evidence from Return to Title IV Funds" (with Elizabeth Bell, Oded Gurantz, and Dennis Kramer) Draft coming soon!
    Presented at SREE 2023
    Abstract Governments must strike a balance between promoting access to financial aid while at the same time remaining good stewards of taxpayer funds by preventing fraudulent access. This paper focuses on one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain access to Title IV aid, the “Return of Title IV” funds policy, referred to as R2T4. Students receiving Title IV aid who withdraw from college before completing the academic term are subject to an R2T4 calculation that could require the student or college to pay back any unearned Title IV funds to the federal government. We estimate the causal impacts of the R2T4 policy on student outcomes in a regression discontinuity design, leveraging a cutoff in the formula that determines whether a student or their college is required to return aid. We find that students at our threshold, who earn 60 percent of the federal aid to which they were entitled see $1,600 returned on average, and typically the college bills them after paying back the federal government. Such debt makes students almost four percentage points less likely to re-enroll in college the following year and 2.6 percentage points within 4 years. These results are driven by students in the bottom half of the income distribution who face persistent negative enrollment effects of around 6 percentage points. Our findings add to a growing body of literature revealing the detrimental impacts of complex administrative processes on student outcomes, particularly for students from marginalized communities interacting with federal policies

  • "How local is local development? Evidence from casinos." [Link] (with Jordan Rosenthal-Kay) submitted
    Presented at UEA European Conference 2023
    Abstract One rationale for place-based policy is that local development produces positive productivity spillovers. We examine the employment spillovers from a common large local development project: opening a casino. Comparing employment in neighborhoods that won a casino license to runner-up neighborhoods that narrowly lost, we find casinos create jobs in their immediate vicinity. However, we estimate net job losses overall when considering the broader neighborhood. Employment gains concentrate in the leisure and hospitality industry, suggesting spillovers are industry-specific or are driven by demand-side forces like trip-chaining. We develop theory to show that our estimates imply a rapid spatial decay of productivity spillovers.

Work in progress

  • "The Distributional Impact of Official Communications: Evidence from Two Massive FAFSA Renewal Campaigns" (with Salman Khan and Dennis Kramer)
    Presenting at APPAM 2024

  • "Do marginal students benefit from longer access to aid?: Evidence from the restriction of PELL lifetime eligibility" (with Salman Khan and Dennis Kramer)

Pre-PhD Research

  • "Aequitas - A bias and fairness audit toolkit" [Link] [Code] (with Pedro Saleiro, Benedict Kuester, Loren Hinkson, Jesse London, Abby Stevens, Kit T Rodolfa, and Rayid Ghani) arXiv preprint (2018) arXiv:1811.05577
    Abstract Recent work has raised concerns on the risk of unintended bias in AI systems being used nowadays that can affect individuals unfairly based on race, gender or religion, among other possible characteristics. While a lot of bias metrics and fairness definitions have been proposed in recent years, there is no consensus on which metric/definition should be used and there are very few available resources to operationalize them. Therefore, despite recent awareness, auditing for bias and fairness when developing and deploying AI systems is not yet a standard practice. We present Aequitas, an open source bias and fairness audit toolkit that was released in 2018 and it is an intuitive and easy to use addition to the machine learning workflow, enabling users to seamlessly test models for several bias and fairness metrics in relation to multiple population sub-groups. Aequitas facilitates informed and equitable decisions around developing and deploying algorithmic decision making systems for both data scientists, machine learning researchers and policymakers

  • "Physical ecology of hypolithic communities in the central Namib Desert: The role of fog, rain, rock habitat, and light" [Link] (with Kimberley A. Warren-Rhodes, Christopher P. McKay, Linda Ng Boyle, Michael R. Wing, Elsita M. Kiekebusch, Don A. Cowan, Francesca Stomeo, Stephen B. Pointing, Kudzai F. Kaseke, Frank Eckardt, Joh R. Henschel, Mary Seely, and Kevin L. Rhodes) Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 118 (2013), pp. 1451-1460.