Senior Economist at Amazon, on the Private Brands Pricing Science team. I build causal inference and experimentation systems in production: incrementality measurement, A/B testing, and causal machine learning applied to pricing and marketplace decisions.
Amazon Ads and AWS, building models to measure and optimize the impact of marketing and sales strategies. Research at the World Bank and the Rhode Island Innovative Policy Lab.
PhD in Economics, Brown University, 2021.
We use new administrative data from Ecuador to study the welfare effects of the misallocation of procurement contracts caused by political connections. Firms that form links with the bureaucracy through their shareholders experience an increased probability of being awarded a government contract. We develop a novel sufficient statistic to measure the efficiency effects of political connections, allowing for heterogeneity in quality, productivity, and non-constant marginal costs. We estimate political connections create welfare losses ranging from 2 to 6% of the procurement budget.
There is a widespread policy view that a lack of job opportunities at home is a key reason for migration. Using panel surveys from eight countries, we show the self-employed are less likely to migrate than wage workers or the unemployed. We then analyze seven randomized experiments that increased self-employment and find their causal impacts on migration are negative on average, but often small in magnitude.
We study the evolution of social distancing behaviors across the U.S. and show that the density of individuals in public places has decreased significantly less than overall foot traffic, with a large gap driven by sustained higher relative density in visits to religious places, and in particular by differential drop-off in visits by destination size.