Research Experience

Postdoctoral Researcher

NBER 2020 - Present

Special Sworn Status Researcher

U.S. Census Bureau 2016 - Present

Research Assistant

NBER Supervisor: Gerald Marschke 2016 – 2020

Working Papers

Click on Paper Titles to View Abstracts

Green Card Quotas and the Misallocation of Talent: Evidence from the STEM Doctoral Labor Market; (Job Market Paper); Submitted The rates of startup formation, business dynamism, and productivity growth in the US economy have declined since the early 2000s, and a growing literature seeks to identify common forces driving these trends. In this paper, I show that binding green card quotas may contribute to these declines by diverting the most highly-skilled workers in the economy away from entrepreneurial ventures resulting in a misallocation of talent. Using a simple job choice framework, I show that the sudden emergence of country-specific green card delays in October 2005 incentivized Chinese and Indian STEM doctorates to seek employment at established firms over startups as the latter are more likely to shut down prior to the resolution of delays. A difference-in-differences analysis reveals that STEM doctorates who faced green card delays reduced their likelihoods of working in US startups over established firms in the first decade of their careers by 42%. This suggests that policies enabling foreign-born STEM doctorates to avoid green card delays or maintain green card eligibility in the face of job destruction are likely to increase the share of such doctorates working at startups early in their careers.

Task Mismatch and Salary Penalties: Evidence from the Biomedical PhD Labor Market with Gerald R. Marschke; (Latest Version) We develop a task-based framework of wage determination where a mismatch between the tasks performed as part of current and previous employment leads to persistent salary penalties. We exploit novel worker-level and longitudinal job task information from a labor market where task mismatch is endemic—the US biomedical PhD labor market—finding that task mismatch explains between-sector heterogeneity in the pecuniary returns to postdoctoral training: a positive postdoc salary premium emerges when task mismatch is low and a negative premium when it is high. Differences in accumulated task-specific human capital explain the sizably negative returns to postdoctoral training in industry.

STEM Employment Resiliency During Recessions: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic with James C. Davis, Gerald R. Marschke, and Andrew J. Wang; (Latest Version); Submitted; Based on NBER Working Paper No. 29568 STEM occupational employment suffered smaller peak-to-trough percentage declines than non-STEM employment during both the Great Recession and COVID-19 recession, suggesting a relative resiliency of STEM employment during recessions in the digital age. We exploit the sudden peak-to-trough declines in STEM and non-STEM employment during the COVID-19 recession to measure STEM recession-resiliency during the pandemic, decomposing our difference-in-differences estimate into parts explained by various sources including differences in demographics, educational attainment, job tasks, remote work capability, industry, and STEM knowledge importance on the job. We find that STEM knowledge importance on the job explains the greatest share of STEM employment resiliency, and that workers in non-STEM occupations who nonetheless use STEM knowledge experienced higher employment rates during the pandemic. We show that R&D expenditures and employment also remained resilient, suggesting only a mild effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on innovative activity. Altogether, our findings suggest that increasing opportunities for STEM training—including outside the college-track—may help improve the employment resiliency of workers during future recessions.

A Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Postdocs in LEHD Data with James C. Davis, Gerald R. Marschke, and Andrew J. Wang (Latest Version) This paper details the creation of the ACS-LEHD Doctorate Panel—a new linked employer-employee longitudinal dataset of the doctoral workforce enabling researchers to analyze the quarterly labor market outcomes of STEM doctorates and postdocs within the secure environment of a Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC). To impute the quarterly postdoc employment status of doctorates in matched ACS-LEHD data, we train a machine learning algorithm on the small share of data for which quarterly postdoc employment status is known, yielding an out-of-sample imputation accuracy of over 97%. We include a preliminary analysis of the earnings disparity between postdoc-trained and nonpostdoc-trained biomedical doctorates in the ACS-LEHD Doctorate Panel, finding that postdoc-trained biomedical doctorates tend to earn less than their nonpostdoc-trained counterparts, and that this difference in pay narrows, but does not disappear, when including firm and occupation fixed effects.

Work in Progress

Worker Mobility, R&D Human Capital, and Firm Productivity with Erling Barth, James C. Davis, Gerald R. Marschke, and Andrew J. Wang

The Impact of High-Skilled Immigration on Domestic Workers (Working Title) with Richard B. Freeman, Gerald R. Marschke, and Xiupeng Wang

The Impact of High-Skilled Immigration on Firm Innovation and Productivity (Working Title) with Richard B. Freeman, Gerald R. Marschke, and Xiupeng Wang

Conference Proceedings

US Engineering Employment During the COVID-19 Pandemic with James C. Davis, Gerald R. Marschke, and Andrew J. Wang; 2022 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings (Link) This paper analyzes the employment trajectories of engineering workers—both workers in occupations formally classified as engineering and workers in occupations not formally classified as engineering but where engineering knowledge is important—during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the employment rate of workers in engineering occupations fell by 6.6 percentage-points at the onset of the pandemic compared to a 13.1 percentage-point drop among workers in non-engineering jobs, and that workers in jobs where engineering knowledge is important were less likely to suffer employment loss during the pandemic, regardless of whether their occupation is formally classified as a STEM engineering occupation. This suggests that engineering knowledge is beneficial in reducing a worker’s unemployment risk during recessions. We also find that industries with the highest share of engineers as workers tended to experience smaller percentage declines in employment during the pandemic compared to overall US employment, although employment in aerospace and motor vehicle manufacturing industries remained over 10% below pre-recession employment as of 2021Q4.

Presentations

2022

NBER Summer Institute 2022 Organization: National Bureau for Economic Research
Session: Science of Science Funding
Presentation Title: Task Mismatch and Salary Penalties: Evidence from the Biomedical PhD Labor Market

ASEE 2022 Annual Conference Organization: American Society for Engineering Education
Poster Title: US Engineering Employment During the COVID-19 Pandemic

SOLE 2022 Annual Conference Organization: Society of Labor Economists
Session: Returns to Different Types of Higher Education
Presentation Title: Task Mismatch and Salary Penalties: Evidence from the Biomedical PhD Labor Market

AEA 2022 Annual Meeting Organization: American Economic Association
Poster Title: Better Safe than Sorry: The Impact of Green Card Delays on the Propensity of Foreign STEM Doctorates to Work at Startups

2021

NBER Investments in Early Career Scientists, Fall 2021 Organization: National Bureau for Economic Research
Presentation Title: Task Mismatch and Salary Penalties: Evidence from the Biomedical PhD Labor Market

NBER Investments in Early Career Scientists, Fall 2021 Organization: National Bureau for Economic Research
Presentation Title: Leveraging Census Data to Study the PhD (and Postdoc) Labor Market

SOLE 2021 Annual Conference Organization: Society of Labor Economists
Session: Skilled Immigration and the Role of Firms
Presentation Title: Better Safe than Sorry: The Impact of Green Card Delays on the Propensity of Foreign STEM Doctorates to Work at Startups

SOLE 2021 Annual Conference Organization: Society of Labor Economists
Session: Health and the Labor Market during COVID-19
Presentation Title: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on STEM Workers and Innovation

2020

Bruce Weinberg Micro Research Group Seminar Presentation Title: The Biomedical Postdoc Salary Penalty: Evidence and Explanations

Census Bureau @ Cornell Seminar Series Presentation Title: Postdoc Career Paths and Labor Market Outcomes

2019

2019 IRIS Summit Organization: Institute for Research on Innovation & Science
Presentation Title: Postdoc Career Paths and Labor Market Outcomes

Teaching Experience

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Instructor of Record

  • Course Ratings

  • Courses (4 Sections)

    • Intermediate Macroeconomics
      • Spring 2017 (2 sections)
      • Fall 2015 (1 section)
    • Labor Economics
      • Summer 2015 (1 section)

Teaching Assistant

  • Courses

    • International Macroeconomics (M.A. Level)
    • Macroeconomics I (Ph.D. Level)
    • Macroeconomics II (Ph.D. Level)

Tutor

  • Courses

    • Principles and Intermediate Microeconomics
    • Principles and Intermediate Macroeconomics

Contact