My research is grounded in economic sociology, public policy, and quantitative methods. I seek out topics of conceptual relevance to both sociology and economics, look for fruitful data sets, and aspire to apply advanced statistical methods in intuitive ways. My dissertation was on the subject of unemployment. I also study model uncertainty and millionaire migration.
Methodology:
"Model Uncertainty in Sociological Research: An Application to Religion and Economic Growth." American Sociological Review. June 2009.
UPDATE: I have a new STATA software package on model uncertainty.
The documentation is here, and the program can be installed from the STATA command line. A simple installation do file is here. Try it out with any regression model you have and let me know what you think!
Millionaire Migration:
"Millionaire Migration and State Taxation of Top Incomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment." National Tax Journal. June, 2011. (with Charles Varner) (Won Dentler Award from the ASA section on Public Sociology.)
Press coverage: this was reported in the Wall Street Journal, plugged in the New York Times; the Trenton Times (NJ) and the Trentonian (NJ) ran editorials on the study, there was a front page story in the Star-Ledger (NJ), and also covered in the San Jose Mercury News, the Sacramento Bee, and the Washington Post here and here. The Philadelphia Inquirer included NJ Governor Chris Christie's response: "when you're dealing with professors, certain things that are theoretical are interesting, but guys like me... have to deal with what's real."
My op-ed in the Boston Review, "Momentum for a Millionaire's Tax" was translated into Hebrew and published in the Israeli business daily, Calcalist.
New working paper: "Millionaire Migration in California: The Impact of Top Tax Rates." (with Charles Varner)
This paper was covered in a front page story in the New York Times, and in a NY Times business page story. Los Angeles Times ran a business-page column on the study, and the Orange County Register ran a (critical) editorial on it; Rueters, CNBC, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post wonkblog picked it up in depth, and a story in the Sacramento Bee includes a video of Governor Jerry Brown reading quotes from the paper. It was also a lead story in the Stanford Report.
Unemployment:
"Losing a Job: The Non-Pecuniary Cost of Unemployment in the United States". Social Forces. December 2012.
Download the replication package (PSID data set and STATA code).
"The Pleasures and Sorrows of the Standard Work Week: Temporal Constraints on Wellbeing for Workers and the Unemployed." (With Chaeyoon Lim) Working Paper.
History of Economics and Sociology:
"The Emergence of Sociology from Political Economy in the United States: 1890 to 1940." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Spring, 2009. (Won best graduate student paper award from ASA History of Sociology section.) Nice orgtheory blog post about this here.
"The Politics, Mathematics, and Morality of Economics." Socio-Economic Review. 2005.
Working papers:
"Unemployment Insurance and Job Search Activity: Evidence from Random Audits"
"Quality Uncertainty in the Market for Medicine: The Disconnect Between Patient Satisfaction and Hospital Quality" (with Xinxiang Chen)
"Religion and Economic Growth in Western Europe: 1500-2000"
Download CV