Biography

I am an applied microeconomist with research interests in health, demographic, and labor economics. I earned my Ph.D. in Economics at The Ohio State University (OSU) in August of 2012. My dissertation was supervised by David Blau (Chair), Audrey Light, and Bruce Weinberg. In my dissertation, Essays on Human Capital Investment, I studied whether parental investment in the human capital of low birth weight children differs by parental education and income, whether fetal exposure to tobacco smoke affects a child’s education and labor market outcomes, and whether credit constraints affect college attendance. During my graduate studies at OSU, I worked as a teaching assistant and as an independent instructor for several undergraduate courses. I was awarded a departmental citation for excellence in teaching in 2010.
I have been a Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Economics at the European University Institute (EUI) since September of 2012. Since becoming a Max Weber Fellow, my work has mainly focused on topics in health economics. My most recent paper studies the impact of the provision of calorie information on menus in chain restaurants on body mass index and the probability of obesity. Two other recent studies also examine the impact of health-related public policies on health outcomes. The first examines the impact of cigarette taxes on health and wages. The second project (joint with Marcos Nakaguma of the University of São Paulo) analyzes the effect of a short-term ban on alcohol consumption and sales on hospital admissions. A work-in-progress with Audrey Light (Ohio State University) aims to gain a better understanding of within-family variation in health and health-related behaviors, by conducting a detailed analysis of the determinants of such variation within families.
In the Spring of 2013, I taught a graduate course on health economics at the EUI, which will be repeated in the Spring of 2014. I am also currently enrolled in a teaching training program at the EUI, and I expect to receive a Max Weber Program Teaching Certificate in the Summer of 2014.