Here are descriptions of research projects, web visualizations, and other endeavors that I’ve worked on over the years.
Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities
50 years after the civil rights movement, racial economic inequality remains a major fact of American life. In fact, the gap in family income between blacks and whites has not changed since the 1960s: The utter lack of progress is striking, especially since racial gaps have narrowed in other areas: college attainment, high school test scores, and life
Vacationsheds
This project attempts to use hotel review data to understand where tourists come from. It stems from my interest in regional tourist destinations—places like the North Shore of Lake Superior, Door County, or Rehoboth Beach that have large, devoted masses of visitors from one or two cities, but are relatively unknown outside of their source
The Contribution of National Income Inequality to Regional Economic Divergence
Over the past 40 years, different regions of the US have pulled apart economically. Average incomes in a handful of thriving metro areas have risen quickly, while those in many parts of the country have stagnated. In 1980, only about 12% of the US population lived in metropolitan areas with incomes more than 20% higher
Tomorrow Without Fear
In 1946, Chester Bowles, director of the Office of Price Administration during WWII (and popularizer of the soap opera before that) wrote a remarkable book about how to maintain a full employment economy after demobilizing from the war—and how creating a just distribution of income would be fundamental to the success of that effort. There
Reviving Growth Keynesianism
I am working with UChicago history PhD students Nic Johnson and Chris Hong on a project to republish economic writing from previous eras of US history, in the hope of revisiting economic lessons that the United States has learned in the past, but now forgotten–particularly on how income inequality reduces economic growth by constraining aggregate
Mechanism Design for Social Good
I presented at the second annual workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good, held in conjunction with EC2018 at Cornell University. My talk was entitled “Mechanism Design and Marginal Distributions.” Most social outcomes result from the combination of two factors. Marginal distributions are the set of possible outcomes that are available, while allocation processes determine which
Where are the Jobs?
Over the past several years, the LEHD program at the US Census Bureau has put together an incredible resource: the LEHD Origin Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) dataset, which provides information on the location and characteristics of every job in the United States that is covered by unemployment insurance. Heavily inspired by the Racial Dot Map, this
Metro Migration
My first web visualization, this map uses migration data from the IRS based on change of to plot the inflows, outflows, and net migration between pairs of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas. It was inspired by this blog post by Aaron Renn. I also used this data in my master’s thesis, Domestic Migration Networks in the
Identifying US Business Districts
As part of my paper on the Spatial Structure of US Metropolitan Employment, I constructed an algorithm to identify the business districts of every Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States and classify them into four categories: Urban cores – large contiguous districts with high employment densities, including both traditional downtowns and walkable neighborhood shopping