I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Southern California. During the academic year 2025-2026, I visited the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
I am an applied microeconomist with research interests at the intersection of spatial economics and political economy.
I am on the 2026-2027 job market.
Job Market Paper
“Where Do Protests Win or Lose Votes? Exposure and Participation in the George Floyd Movement”
(Previously circulated as “The Geography of Protests: Spatial Fragmentation, Exposure, and Participation in the George Floyd Movement.”)
AbstractDraft (PDF)
This paper asks how protests affect voting in the neighborhoods where they take place and in those where their participants live. Combining 7,920 geocoded George Floyd protest events with mobile phone location data, I measure for each block group in American metropolitan areas its exposure to nearby protests and its residents’ participation. I then exploit differences in exposure and participation across block groups within the same zip code to estimate the effect of each on the change in vote shares between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Neighborhoods near protest sites saw increases in Republican vote share, a backlash that decays with distance and is larger near violent protests. Neighborhoods whose residents attended protests saw increased Democratic vote share, a mobilization that comes from participation in nonviolent protests. Results are similar in a difference-in-differences design that follows the same neighborhoods across the presidential elections from 2012 to 2024, in which the two groups did not move apart before the protests. The effects coexist: the backlash is large but concentrated in the neighborhoods near a protest, the mobilization small but spread across many neighborhoods. Participation moved about 137,000 votes toward the Democrats, while exposure near protest sites cost them about 87,000; adding the imprecise effect of exposure farther away, the net is not distinguishable from zero. Through their direct local effects alone, the George Floyd protests are unlikely to have decided the 2020 presidential election.
Work in Progress
“Congregations and the Market for Urban Floor Space: Evidence from São Paulo”
Abstract
Religious congregations have multiplied in the cities of developing countries. They need floor space like any household or business, yet economics has rarely studied congregations as occupants of urban space. This paper studies the competition between congregations, households and businesses for floor space in São Paulo, where more than one new congregation has been registered every day for the past thirty years. I explore where congregations locate, how their location choice affects the neighborhood around them, and whether they attract or displace one another. I use three public registers that follow every congregation, every property and every property sale in the city over three decades. New congregations are more likely to locate in neighborhoods that are poor and growing fast. Most congregations occupy properties recorded as housing or shops rather than as temples. They cluster: the median active congregation has five others within 250 meters. These patterns matter for how fast-growing cities allocate scarce space among worship, housing and commerce.
“The Urban Constraints on Political Mobilization: Evidence from American Cities”
Abstract
Protests take place in urban locations with specific characteristics: venues that are spacious, centrally located and well connected to the rest of the city. This paper studies how the structure of a city constrains political mobilization, across cities and within them. Across cities, I combine data on protests in American municipalities between 2020 and 2023 with a measure of the entropy of each city's street network. Cities with a more chaotic street network have fewer protests, including violent protests and events associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Within cities, I combine the location of protest venues with mobile phone location data and the street network, to measure how well connected each venue is to the neighborhoods around it, in distance and in travel time. I then study whether protests take place where venues are better connected, and how far participants travel to reach them. Urban structure can act as a constraint or as a coordination device for political mobilization.
“The Labor Market Returns to Religious Networks: Evidence from Uganda” (with Aruj Shukla)
Abstract
In the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, firms hire through personal referrals, and most people attend a religious service every week. This paper asks whether congregations can work as a labor market network. In surveys of firm owners and workers in the welding and carpentry sectors of Kampala, owners report that finding candidates is harder than screening them, and that trustworthiness is the trait they value most in a hire. Fellow churchgoers are trusted almost as much as family, and congregations bring together people from more diverse occupations than networks of friends and relatives. Yet owners hire through referrals from other firms, friends and relatives, and almost never through their congregation. We design a randomized controlled trial in which pastors organize job matching between the firm owners and the job seekers of their congregation, to study whether a trusted and diverse network that already exists can reduce search frictions in urban labor markets.