economics

My work is all centered around the economics of education. While this makes me at my core a labor economist, I filter in and out of a lot of other fields (development, market design, IO, metrics, behavioral, theory) so that I can use their tools to answer the questions I’m working on!

research

works in progress (with drafts)

School-House Shocks: The Effect of Neighborhood-based School Assignment Policies on Intracity Migration

My second-year paper! I’d love to improve on these estimates using individual-level housing data, though this seems difficult to acquire.

Abstract: Affirmative action policies based on geographic characteristics are potentially manipulable by families who move in response to the policy, undermining policy goals and hurting families who the policy is intended to help. I test whether these channel have significant impacts in Chicago, where admissions to selective high schools depend on the demographics of a students’ neighborhood. Using data from Chicago Public Schools and the Cook County Assessor’s office, I find no effects of marginal tier assignment on short-term migration of families or long-term housing prices.

works in progress (as in, actually in progress)

Identifying and Nurturing Math Talent: An experiment with self-paced AoPS classes (AEA pre-registry)

In some joint work with Esther Duflo, Glenn Ellison, Sara Ellison, and Harini Kannan, we’re currently running a pilot in Tamil Nadu giving access to high-quality math curricula to talented students who otherwise have few resources to help them reach their full potential. We ran a pilot from 2023–2024, and are scaling up to an RCT with 2,400 students over the next year! We’ve received funding from the Agency Fund, Founders’ Pledge and J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative for this project.

 

Chicago’s school assignment system

How well does it improve access? Are there alternative designs that could also work? These questions are a lot more pertinent given last year’s affirmative action ruling by the Supreme Court, and even more relevant given CPS’s recent interest in neighborhood schools. As a Blueprint Labs research associate, I’m also leading some work on Chicago’s charter schools — lots in progress!

works in “progress” (just thinking about ‘em for now)

iterations on MDRD1 and MDRD2

how to assign teachers to students

the role of gifted education in the system as a whole

where does motivation come from?

early decision/action as a form of market power

alternative pathways to college/besides college

education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PhD in Economics, 2021–

NSF Graduate Research Fellow, 2021–2026

As year number four starts, I think I’ve finally started to hit my stride in terms of having ideas I think are interesting and I’m excited to work on. Excited to have a year off of teaching (despite how much I like teaching) to see what can come of it all. We’ll see if I can figure out this whole “research prioritizing” thing, coming up with ideas, and seeing ideas through to completion.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SB in Mathematical Economics, 2017–2021

Minor in Public Policy, Phi Beta Kappa

MIT was a wonderful place to do my undergrad, filled with people who were all excited about something. Here’s a post with many, many reflections on this institution. Three quick reflections for those who don’t want to read the whole thing (and reflections I probably would have figured out anywhere else):

1. At MIT, you learn, mostly in unexpected ways. All of the ways that I changed the most had nothing to do with the content of a class; it was the things I chose to be involved in, the people I met, and the things I figured out about myself.
2. I spent a lot of time in structured non-academic pursuits: deliberate time around others, ESP, science bowl, and much more. During college, I found how necessary it is for me to have non-academic things filling my life; I am not a person that can just do work forever.
3. One of the most difficult parts of MIT is that it sometimes feels bad to do things just for your own sake. Not in the sense that MIT is competitive (it is not), but when you are surrounded by so many smart and high-achieving people who have done amazing things, it can feel like you need to be “productive” all the time. I am still learning how to let go of this feeling.

Davidson Academy of Nevada

HS Diploma in Mathematical Economics, 2013–2017

I was very lucky to go to Davidson. While I’m still piecing together my thoughts on the concept of gifted education, I will always be grateful to have had access to so many resources at DA (classes, teachers, activities…) and also to the friends who shaped much of my values and identity.

pre-history

undergraduate work

Evaluating Strategic Play: Manipulations with Symmetric Information in the Boston Mechanism (link)

Undergraduate Thesis advised by Parag Pathak. 2021.

I worked a lot with ESP and their programs, and for my thesis, I analyzed the mechanism ESP uses to assign students to classes, a variant of the Boston system extended to many-to-many matching. My initial proposal considered a lot of topics, like “better” mechanisms and the welfare gains/losses due to strategic play. While I’d love to delve into those topics, time constraints led me to focus in on whether a student with symmetric information (in the spirit of Roth + Rothblum (1999)) can benefit by misreporting their strategies. In the end, my feelings about finishing a thesis played a non-zero role in my choice to enroll in grad school (versus working in industry).

 

A Rising Tide for All or Wave for One?: The Effect of Charter School Competition on District Achievement (link)

Written for 14.33. MIT Undergraduate Journal of Economics, Vol. XX. 2021.

This paper was my first independent research project, and uses variation in the effectiveness of state laws to identify the impact that charters have on overall student performance. I don’t think that this paper was fantastic, but I do think that it was a very worthwhile exercise to help me understand a bit more what the process of research is actually like.

ra work

Optimal Public Transportation Networks: Evidence from the World’s Largest Bus Rapid Transit System in Jakarta. RA for Ben Olken, Gabriel Kreindler, Rema Hanna, and Arya Gaduh. A summer RA project where I developed a pipeline to process 60 million riders’ data. My worked helped contribute to research on lockdown mobility and the optimal network design!

 

The Surprising Hybrid Pedigree of Measures of Diversity and Economic Concentration. (link) NBER WP #26512, with Ernst Berndt, Rena Conti. A paper understanding the theory behind measuring market concentration, and applying said measures to the pharmaceutical industry. Adajar, P., Berndt, E., and Conti, R. NBER Working Paper Series 26512. 2019.

 

Values: How do they Contribute to Economic Success? (link) Journal of Organizational Psychology, Vol. 18(1), with Mark Pingle. My first ever RA project (primarily helping with a literature review), and my introduction to economics and research as a career.

work

Bridgewater Associates

Investment Engineer Intern, Summer 2020

Bridgewater is a company known for its culture of “radical transparency.” Interning at Bridgewater gave me a chance to grow a lot as a person as I learn how to better respond to feedback. Regarding the work itself, I think I learned a lot from my first experiences in the financial world about being in industry and building systems for understanding the economy; you can read more of my thoughts on this blog post.

 

NERA

Anti-trust Intern, Winter 2020

NERA showed me what economics “industry” feels like: faster-paced, more emphasis on office communication, and the impetus to have deliverables. Perhaps the most interesting thing I figured out at NERA was how some employees who initially planned to return to graduate school were slowly being convinced otherwise. Talking to these people, I realized that their reasons for not going to grad school didn’t resonate with me at all, and helped push me to apply to grad school.

 

Government Accountability Office

Student Intern — Applied Research and Methods, Summer 2019

I worked at GAO as part of the MIT-DC Internship Program, exposing me to the world of policy. During the internship, I got to talk with many PhDs working in public policy about their experiences and why they chose to work in the public sector.