Job Market Paper

The US Social Security Administration administers retirement, disability, and low-income safety net programs supported by their network of field offices providing in-person customer service. I use employee microdata and a long-differences approach to analyze how staffing decreases during the Reagan era affected program enrollment. I find that a 10% decrease in field office employees in a county led to decreases in enrollment for Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) benefits of 0.06%, driven primarily by disability insurance, and 0.32% for Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) benefits. These reductions imply 79,027 fewer enrollments nationwide than would have occurred absent the staffing cuts.

Paper: PDF Press: UCI , The American Prospect, Chicago Sun Times

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In April 2022, the Taliban banned opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, causing an estimated 95 percent decline in cultivation between the 2022 and 2023 harvests. Before the ban, Afghanistan supplied over 90 percent of the world's opium and the opium economy accounted for 9 to 14 percent of national GDP. We use this policy shock to study how resource exhaustion reshapes conflict and political control in a fragile state. We develop a conceptual framework that adapts standard resource-conflict theories to resource exhaustion and distinguishes between actors engaged in productive and appropriative activity. Using a district-month panel and a difference-in-differences design with continuous treatment intensity based on pre-ban cultivation, we find sharply heterogeneous responses. Poppy-growing districts experienced more protests and riots, consistent with economic grievance, but no significant increase in organized armed violence. By contrast, districts with pre-existing anti-Taliban resistance activity, which had little direct exposure to cultivation, experienced substantial declines in organized violence. These findings are consistent with resource exhaustion generating economic grievance in directly exposed areas while weakening organized resistance elsewhere, facilitating the Taliban’s consolidation of power.

States frequently implement generalized or targeted tax credit programs to spur job creation. These programs vary considerably in their provisions, however despite their popularity, little is known about the influence of legislative composition on the provisions included in these laws. Using a database of all U.S. state-level hiring credit programs from 1969 through 2011 (n=140), I analyze three major policy provisions and find that full-refundability provisions, which benefit smaller firms, are 25% less likely when Republicans hold a majority in both chambers, and 32% less likely when those majorities are veto-proof, compared to split legislatures. Recapture provisions, which allow states to claw back tax credit when program requirements are not met, are 30% more likely when Democrats have a veto-proof majority in both chambers, but 35% less likely under Republican majorities. Carry-forward provisions do not have any apparent partisan alignment. These patterns reflect a combination of partisan policy preferences and legislative bargaining dynamics.