Research and Presentations
Published/Accepted Research
"Do Conditional Cash Transfers create resilience against poverty? Long-run evidence from Jamaica". World Development, 2024, Vol 176. [link]
"Robust Estimates of Vulnerability to Poverty using Quantile Models". Economic Modelling, 2023. Vol 123. [link]
"An Examination of the Effect of Inequality on Lotteries for Funding Public Goods." (with Cary Deck and Li Zhang). Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2022, Vol 24(4) . [link]
"A Living Wage for Jamaica: Considerations for Calculation and Implementation" (with Lauren Marsh and Danny Roberts). Social and Economic Studies, 2017, Vol 66(1&2) . [link]
Working Papers
"Public goods provision in complex contexts: Does inequality matter when contributors are revealed?". Under Review . [link]
- Summary: This paper experimentally examines the question of how inequality in wealth affects contributions to public goods in a setting where contributors observe each other’s actions. The results show that in the context where contributors are observed, inequality reduces public goods funding, but only in the case of extreme inequality. At least nominally, for low to medium levels of inequality, the opposite is observed: total contributions to public goods is higher in low to medium levels of inequality. At the subject level, rich subjects significantly increased their contributions to public goods relative to contributions observed in equality. However, as inequality gets even higher, the rich kept their contributions at the level observed in equality. These findings contrast with prior studies in anonymous settings where a uniformly negative relationship between inequality and contributions is generally observed. This paper develops an economic theory integrating inequality and social image concerns, which contextualizes and corroborates the experimental results.
Works in Progress:
“Impacts of Agricultural Productivity on Worker Reallocation and Household Welfare: Evidence from Uganda"
“Discrimination and Discretion: Evaluating Police Body Cameras' Influence on Officer Decision-Making and Bias"
Other Research/Reports:
“Household Consumption” in the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions (JSLC) 2012, 2013 and 2014.
“Westmoreland Modified Local Area Economic Profile (LEAP)” (2013)
Presentation of Research:
Southern Economic Association 94th Annual Meeting. Washington DC (2024)
Summer Research Seminar, Economics and Accounting Department, College of the Holy Cross. Worcester, Massachusetts. (June 2024)
Public Choice Society Meeting. Dallas, Texas (March 2024)
Southern Economic Association 93rd Annual Meeting. New Orleans, Louisiana (2023)
Southern Economic Association 92nd Annual Meeting. Fort Lauderdale, Florida (2022)
Public Choice Society Meeting. Nashville, Tennessee (March 2022)
ACM conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization. Online (October 2021)
EFLS brown bag University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (November 2021)
Southern Economic Association 91st Annual Meeting. Houston, Texas (November 2021)
Association for Mentoring and Inclusion in Economics (AMIE). Online (March 2021)
Southern Economic Association 90th Annual Meeting. Online (November 2020)
8th Annual Caribbean Child Research Conference. Kingston, Jamaica (2015).