PUBLICATIONS
Bidding for Firms: Subsidy Competition in the U.S. Journal of Political Economy 133(8) August 2025. Awards: National Tax Association Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation, International Industrial Organization Conference Best Rising Star Paper, University of Virginia Outstanding Dissertation. Data: Dataverse. Data Appendix.
Corporate Political Spending and State Tax Policy: Evidence from Citizens United (with Alisa Tazhitdinova and Sarah Robinson) Journal of Public Economics 221 May 2023. Publisher’s Link. Featured in: Wall Street Journal, Harvard Law School Forum.
Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives (with Owen Zidar) Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(2) Spring 2020. Slides. Featured in: Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Governing.
WORKING PAPERS
Consolidation and Political Influence in the Auto Retail Industry (with Sarah Moshary) [Updated! 3/26] Reject and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy Abstract: This paper provides novel empirical evidence on how and why industry consolidation enhances political influence. Focusing on the auto retail industry, we show that large acquisitions lead to higher levels of lobbying, on the order of 30%. This increase in lobbying translates into more favorable legislation for the industry. Using a border identification strategy, we show that the increase is driven by acquisitions that reduce free-riding incentives in political investment. Our findings underscore the distinction between concentration and size in economic models of lobbying.
The Political Economy of Subsidy-Giving Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of the European Economic Association Abstract: Politicians regularly offer large discretionary subsidies to attract firms to their jurisdictions. In this paper I quantify the political benefit of this subsidy-giving by combining hand-collected subsidy data, county level election returns, and an original survey of voters. Subsidy-giving generates a 2ppt increase in vote share for incumbent governors in the winning county. I use the survey estimates to inform bounds on a state-level effect, and I find that observed subsidy-giving is pivotal for 12% of the elections in the sample. I show that this effect is not due to realized job creation. Instead, the salience of firm attraction drives electoral rewards.
State Capacity and Infrastructure Costs (with Zachary Liscow and William Nober) Abstract: How much is a good bureaucrat worth? We study this question in the case of U.S. infrastructure construction; a setting where costs are high and rising. We find that higher-quality government engineers deliver observationally similar projects at significantly lower cost; going from the 25th to 75th percentile of engineer quality is associated with a 14% reduction in project-level costs. Further, losing expertise to retirement has substantial consequences: the cost increase arising from engineer departures is six times the size of their wages. Our results highlight the value of experience and human capital in public organizations. Survey with responses. Featured in: Bloomberg, Brookings, Construction Briefing, Noahpinion, Pew, Project Syndicate, The American Propsect.
Legislation, Regulation and Litigation: Demand for U.S. Legal Services in Historical Perspective (with Ariell Reshef) Abstract: The U.S. legal services industry experienced a dramatic demand shift between 1970 and 1990: the employment share more than doubled and relative wages of lawyers rose by 60%, in stark contrast to stability before and after this period. We argue that legislative and regulatory changes starting in the 1960s increased the scope of the law and created uncertainty over legal outcomes. To overcome limited enforcement capacity, the government introduced fee-shifting provisions that incentivized private litigation as a substitute for public enforcement. Using over 100 years of data, we show that lawyers' employment and compensation track federal regulation, fee-shifting statutes, and civil litigation. We exploit variation from fee-shifting additions to pre-existing legislation and find sharp increases in case filings. State-level analysis corroborates the link between legislation and lawyer demand, and we find little support for alternative explanations. We estimate that legislative uncertainty accounts for 13% of the demand shift—a cost of 28 billion dollars in 2024 alone. Featured in: EconPol Forum.
Works in Progress
The Distributional Effects of Million Dollar Plants (with Ben Hyman, Moises Yi, and Owen Zidar)
Tax Discrimination: Competition in the Market for Firms (with Mathilde Muñoz)