Research

Working papers

“Trip-taking and Amenity Exposure” (with Andrew Earle)

When people travel, the amenities they are exposed to differ from the amenities at their home. We study how travel changes exposure to one amenity with wide-ranging impacts on well-being: temperature. Using cellphone-based mobility data, we compare the temperatures where people visit to the temperatures where they live. Across the contiguous United States in 2019, travel slightly increases exposure to pleasant temperatures (60-85F) while decreasing exposure to cold and heat. We explore heterogeneity across several dimensions. Travel tends to cool relatively warm cities—e.g., Phoenix, AZ—and warm cool cities—e.g., Minneapolis, MN—which can increase or decrease exposure to pleasant temperatures depending on the season. These exposure changes tend to be larger for high-income tracts. Our results suggest that travel could prove an important margin for climate adaptation.

Works in progress

“Price Check: Mobile Broadband and Consumer Price Response” [JMP]

Smartphones provide a way for consumers to learn about both products and competitors at practically any time—and for firms to learn much more about consumers. It is therefore no surprise that the Internet transformed how consumers shop; by 2018, between 14% and 17% of retail dollars were spent online, with half of all e-commerce traffic coming from mobile devices. The bankruptcies of large retailers (such as Borders and Sears) in the 2010s demonstrate how important this consumer response can be, as retailers faced intense competition both with online shopping and with other brick-and-mortar retailers.

In this paper, I examine the extent to which smartphone adoption and increasing mobile Internet coverage changed consumer behavior. I emulate Hersh, Lang, and Lang (2022) in using machine learning techniques to predict historical 3G coverage with the FCC’s Antenna Structure Registration (ASR) program. Combined with Nielsen scanner data, I determine consumers’ access to mobile Internet. I then estimate demand for a number of goods (including beer, nutritional supplements, potato chips, and toilet paper) following Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1993) and Conlon and Gortmaker (2025) to estimate how Internet availability changed consumers’ price responsiveness. I find that 3G decreases the median own-price elasticity of these products, though not equally everywhere. This phenomenon may indicate a convergence of sorts, as consumers in more elastic markets became less price-elastic. This effect seems more pronounced in products that are more commonly purchased, such as potato chips and toilet paper, and less so in more infrequent purchases like supplements. Greater informational availability and increased targeted marketing is the most likely mechanism, with such marketing primarily focusing on the intensive margin of motivating repeat purchases of familiar goods/brands.

“Where to Next? Mobile Broadband and Business Dynamics”

I study the impact of mobile broadband access and smartphone adoption (together, “smartphone access”) on business dynamics. Using point-of-interest data in conjunction with estimated 3G access, I find that smartphone access favors establishments and firms that were already prominent prior to this technology becoming available. Rollout decreased establishment churn and increased the proliferation of large regional and national firms. I also identify small positive effects on the likelihood that consumer-facing establishments remain open 1-3 years after entry. Regarding location decisions, I find no evidence to support a change in new entrants’ distance to incumbent establishments larger than a few feet.

“Out of Bounds: An Examination of Portland, OR’s Urban Growth Boundary”

Urban growth boundaries reduce the supply of developable land; economic intuition suggests that such policies will increase land prices within the boundary and lead to greater density of development. Using a series of expansions in Portland, OR’s urban growth boundary from 2008-2019, I conclude that zoning changes caused by annexation to the boundary led to a 67% increase in land value per acre and a 68% increase in total valuation for annexed parcels. Renovation and new construction likewise increase by 5-7 percentage points. Spillover effects on nearby parcels are negligible, and though newly-annexed areas do see about 18% more street intersections and 13% fewer parcels. The effects are largely concentrated in the period of zoning change, which may reflect (re)development in affected areas—not a lasting increase in local housing density.

“The Micro-Geography of Productivity, Density, and Sorting” (with Oren Ziv)