Hi! I'm Dylan. I'm on the 2026-27 job market.
I study labor and econometrics.
Job Market Paper
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[draft coming soon]Are the effects of minimum wage hikes evidence for or against monopsony? Using new firm-level microdata, we find that firms paying just below the new minimum wage increase employment and lower prices relative to competitors. But, firms already paying the old minimum wage decrease employment and raise prices. This is new evidence that minimum wages increase employment and lower prices up to a threshold, above which the effects flip signs. We interpret these results in a monopsony model with spillovers in labor and product markets. We find that unconstrained markups and markdowns are large, yet aggregate employment falls. The minimum wages we study raise wages primarily through market-level spillovers, which decrease employment, rather than reductions in firm-level markdowns, which increase employment. Directly studying these firm-level responses allows us to identify consistent economic mechanisms across policies, even when aggregate effects differ in sign.
Publications
- The Review of Economics and Statistics, Forthcoming. [pdf] [package] [github] [ReStat]Standard estimators in information provision experiments place more weight on individuals who update their beliefs more in response to new information. This paper shows that, in practice, these individuals who update the most have the weakest causal effects of beliefs on outcomes. Standard estimators therefore understate these causal effects. I propose an alternative local least squares (LLS) estimator that recovers a representative unweighted average effect in a broad class of learning rate models that generalize Bayesian updating. In five of six recent studies, estimates of the effects of beliefs on outcomes increase. In two, they more than double.
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Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2022
[pdf] [JPAM]The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government-imposed restrictions that temporarily shuttered millions of American businesses. We use a nationwide survey of thousands of small business owners to establish three main facts about business owners' decisions to reopen at the end of the lockdowns. First, roughly 60 percent of firms planned to reopen within days of the end of legal restrictions, suggesting that the lockdowns were generally binding for businesses—although nearly 30 percent expected to delay their reopening by at least a month. Second, decisions to delay reopenings did not seem to be driven by concerns about employee or customer health; even businesses in high-proximity sectors with the highest health risks generally reported intentions to reopen as soon as regulations allowed. Third, pessimistic demand projections primarily explain delays among firms that could legally reopen. Owners expected demand to be one-third lower than before the crisis throughout the pandemic. Using experimentally induced shocks to perceived demand, we find that a 10 percent decline in expected demand results in a 1.5 percentage point (8 percent) increase in the likelihood that firms expected to remain closed for at least one month after being legally able to open. We use follow-up surveys to cross-validate expectations with realized outcomes. Overall, our results suggest that governments set more stringent guidelines for reopening than what many businesses would have selected, suggesting that governments may have internalized costs of contagion that businesses did not.
Working Papers
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Updated October 2026. Under Review. [pdf]Using point-of-sale and payroll data, we estimate the direct tax savings, behavioral tipping response, and incidence of the 2025 No Tax on Tips (NTOT) provision. The average tipped worker directly saves $531, but these savings are concentrated: 26% earn too little to benefit. Tip revenue rose 3.1% post-enactment as firms newly enabled tipping. Workers kept 72 cents of each new tip dollar, while firms lowered base pay by the remaining 28 cents. Overall, NTOT raised the average tipped worker’s after-tax earnings by approximately 3.3%. The new tips are a raise for workers and, partly, a wage subsidy to firms.
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[draft coming soon]Tipping is large and growing, yet little is known about why firms adopt it or what happens to workers and firms when they do. We link point-of-sale and payroll records at 20,000 U.S. firms, so we see tips when customers pay them and when workers earn them. The share of firm revenue paid in tips barely moves from month to month. Tips therefore make hourly pay move with demand, while base wages and prices do not. Firms that begin collecting tips claw back 23 to 30 cents for each dollar of tips through lower base wages, and workers keep the rest as a raise. Tips may also reward effort: workers at tipping firms earn more by serving more customers, so they supply more effort when demand rises. We test this with demand shocks constructed from customer spending at other businesses. A demand shock raises revenue nearly twice as much and hours nearly four times as much at tipping firms as at non-tipping firms. Output per hour also rises more at tipping firms, despite the larger increase in hours. The firm gains from the added effort, even though it recovers less than a third of the tips through lower base wages. Yet not every firm adopts tipping: the cost of adopting remains high where customers do not expect to tip. A model calibrated to these estimates implies that tipping benefits both workers and firms. These gains may explain why tipping has grown.
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September 2025. [pdf]Heterogeneity robust difference-in-differences methods typically require control units that remain untreated throughout the entire post-treatment window. This prevents the identification of long-run effects when researchers observe fewer pre-treatment periods than post-treatment periods. We show that cohort-stacked estimators identify long-run effects by chaining together successive not-yet-treated controls. This approach uses overlapping cohorts to extend identification under standard common trends assumptions. We apply this to the earnings effects of parenthood. In a setting where direct methods identify effects only four years post-birth, chaining extends identification to eight years.