Welcome

On the academic job market in 2024-25

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. My primary interests are microeconomic theory and market design, with a focus on questions relevant to public policy and regulation. My advisor is Professor Paul Milgrom.

Academic Research

In-Kind Subsidies with Topping Up (Job Market Paper) with Zi Yang Kang

Link coming soon

We characterize the optimal in-kind subsidy mechanism for redistribution in settings where recipients can access a private market to “top up” their subsidized consumption. The optimal subsidy design depends on two key factors: the cost of public funds and the correlation between demand for the good and the social planner’s welfare weights. When the social planner seeks to redistribute to consumers with lower demand for the good, subsidies are optimal only if lump-sum transfers are unavailable and the cost of public funds is lower than the average welfare weight, leading to subsidies for consumption up to a maximum level. When the social planner seeks to redistribute to consumers with higher demand for the good, the social planner may prefer in-kind subsidies to lump-sum transfers, providing discounts for consumption beyond a minimum level. In both cases, the optimal subsidy increases in the designer’s preference to redistribute and decreases in the cost of the good, but the effect of increasing inequality aversion depends on the correlation of welfare weights and demand for the good.

Optimal In-Kind Redistribution (with Zi Yang Kang)

This paper develops a model of in-kind redistribution where consumers participate in either a private market or a government-designed program, but not both. We characterize when a social planner, seeking to maximize weighted total surplus, can strictly improve upon the laissez-faire outcome. We show that the optimal mechanism consists of three components: a public option, nonlinear subsidies, and laissez-faire consumption. We quantify the resulting distortions and relate them to the correlation between consumer demand and welfare weights. Our findings reveal that while private market access constrains the social planner’s ability to redistribute, it also strengthens the rationale for non-market allocations.

A Walrasian Mechanism with Markups for Nonconvex Economies (with Paul Milgrom)

Revise and Resubmit at Review of Economic Studies

We introduce Markup equilbrium, an extension of Walrasian equilibrium that adds a markup to the prices that consumers pay to ensure existence even in nonconvex quasilinear economies. Markup equilibria are resource-feasible, incur no budget deficit, and require little more communication and computation than the Walrasian equilibrium. The Markup direct mechanism is large-market incentive-compatible. Our Bound-Form First Welfare Theorem states that for any feasible allocation and price vector, the welfare loss compared to a first-best allocation is at most the sum of (i) the budget surplus and (ii) any rationing losses suffered by the participants. This implies that any Markup equilibrium with a small markup is nearly efficient. (Previously circulated as “Linear Pricing Mechanisms for Market without Convexity”).

Strong monotonicity and perturbation-proofness of Walrasian equilibrium

Awarded Best Paper by Young Researcher at the 2023 Econometric Society Australasian Meeting.

We study the price impact of small perturbations to Walrasian equilibrium, as might be caused by changes in the supply vector, changes in the set of participants, or misreports by an agent. A (nested) sequence of markets is perturbation-proof if, given any supply vector, the price impact of any bounded perturbation is inversely proportional to the number of agents. Perturbation-proofness implies good incentive properties of Walrasian equilibrium in large markets and robustness of prices to small misspecifications. Replica economies are perturbation-proof if and only if the base economy’s demand correspondence is strongly monotone. When buyers’ preferences are drawn identically and independently from a type distribution with a strongly monotone expected demand correspondence, the resulting sequence of economies is perturbation-proof with high probability. We argue that strong monotonicity of the expected demand correspondence is a realistic assumption in economic models with indivisibilities, reflecting variety in the set of possible preferences and uncertainty about reservation prices associated with demand changes.

Congestion in Labor Markets (with Shoshana Vasserman and John J. Horton)

Link coming soon

We report the results of a field experiment on an online labor market platform that introduced a ``soft’’ cap on the number of applications that could be received for a job opening and the number of days applications were accepted. Despite reducing the number of applications per opening, the intervention did not reduce the hiring probability or reported match quality. We interpret this as evidence of inefficient congestion: before the intervention, applicants submitted too many applications to popular jobs and too few to less popular ones. We show that inefficient congestion can arise due to a “missing market” for job applications and the associated failure of applicants to internalize their effects on the hiring probability of competing applicants. We find that application fees introduced by the platform reduced hire rates and competition among candidates, suggesting that these fees may have been miscalibrated or higher than socially efficient.