Research

Little School on the Prairie: A Push for Structural Transformation (Job Market Paper)

2025

Does education cause structural transformation? Using newly available full count census records from the early 20th century Canadian prairies, I examine the effect of the rollout of schools. I construct new census links and create the finest geolocations available in North American census records. Isolating schooling access at an individual child level, I estimate a difference-in-differences by cohort, relying on variation in school opening dates relative to a child’s age. I find that schooling access led children to exit agriculture as adults, move farther away from home, and earn higher incomes. They are significantly more likely to work in a higher skill services occupation, including as teachers, as adults. I interpret these results through the lens of a structural model of education-occupation-migration and find that the expansion of schools led to migration away from the most agriculturally marginal land, towards growing cities. This suggests that education access can act as a push factor for structural transformation out of agriculture in rural areas.

Bridging the 49th Parallel: Matching Histories across the US-Canadian border

2025

With Kevin Didi, Shari Eli, and Stephan Heblich.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland, emigrated to Canada following a family tragedy, and soon moved to the United States in search of better opportunities for his work teaching the deaf. His work eventually led to the invention of the telephone. By linking individual census records between Canada and the U.S. from this transformative period, we aim to uncover personal histories like that of Alexander Graham Bell while systematically documenting how cross-border migration flows shaped socioeconomic development on both sides of the border. This analysis will provide deeper insights into how migration influenced labor markets, industrial growth, and agricultural expansion in two nations that emerged as key players in the global economy during this time.

Parcel Assembly

2024

With Stephan Heblich and James Macek.

Housing supply elasticities are significantly smaller in more developed areas. This paper explores a micro-foundation for this observation: that areas with more fragmented land are subject to a hold-up problem between landowners and developers. Using exogenous variation in parcel fragmentation from the nineteenth century in the city of Toronto, we show that areas with more parcels were less likely to be redeveloped in the twentieth century as the city grew.

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Toronto vs Everybody: The Effect of Property Taxes on Business Establishments

2023

Business property taxes are a significant revenue source for municipalities, but what is their impact on local business establishments? Utilizing a change in provincial policy which forced the city of Toronto to lower business property tax rates, I examine the effect of business property taxes on business activity. I estimate that the elasticity of establishment employment with respect to the property tax rate is less than one, although the results are imprecise. I find larger elasticities for establishments utilizing industrial property versus commercial property, suggesting that industrial establishments are more sensitive to business property taxes. Contrasting with the previous literature I conclude that the impact on establishments from business property taxes can be minimized by maintaining updated property assessments and excluding fixed capital from the property assessment base.

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The Citation Advantage of Promoted Articles in a Cross-Publisher Distribution Platform: A 12-Month Randomized Controlled Trial

Published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2019

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Online Distribution Channel Increases Article Usage on Mendeley: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Published in Scientometrics, 2017

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Demagnetization of an Entire Accelerator Vault

Published in 7th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf. (IPAC’16), Busan, Korea, May 8-13, 2016, 2016

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