Research

1. When Cities Grow: Urban Planning and Segregation in the Prewar US Solo-authored job market paper, recipient of the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award (2023), the AREUEA Best Paper Award by a Junior Scholar (2022), and the IPUMS USA Research Award (2019).

This paper follows New York City from 1870 to 1950, using federal census records and newly digitized real-estate transactions, to ask what segregated the city. Transit came first. Segregation rose as the subways spread, and the 1916 zoning code largely formalized a pattern that was already in place.

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2. Immigration, Innovation, and the Geography of Growth With Costas Arkolakis and Michael Peters 

Appendix 

Supplemental Material 

Media Coverage : Forbes, VoxEU

Immigration adds workers to an economy, but not just any workers, and not just anywhere. Between 1850 and 1920, millions of Europeans crowded into a handful of American cities. This paper asks how much the country’s rise to the technological frontier depended on where those newcomers settled and what skills they brought.

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3. Debt, Drought, and Mobility: How Bankruptcy Institutions Shape Adjustment to Economic Shocks With Tao Chen, Marta Santamaria, Claudia Steinwender.

Homestead exemptions protected nineteenth-century farmers from their creditors and, in doing so, tied them to their land. This paper asks what happened when federal bankruptcy law cut them loose, and how credit institutions shaped the movement out of American agriculture.

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4. Growing Through Vintages With Ana Cecília Fieler — 2026 DRAFT IS POSTED!

Appendix 

Most patents make a better version of something. A few are breakthroughs that start an industry. Using a century and a half of American patents and manufacturing censuses back to 1860, this paper asks how much of US growth came from that second kind of invention.