Peer-Reviewed Publications

"International Financial Volatility and Commodity Exports: Evidence from the Thai Agricultural Sector" forthcoming in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2010.

"Trade and Migration in an Enlarged European Union: A Spatial Analysis" forthcoming in Global Economy Journal of the Berkeley Electronic Press, 2009.

"Jump Down, Turn Around, Pick a Bale of...Poverty? U.S. Cotton Policy and Household Income in Côte d'Ivoire" in Economics of Developing Countries, Tiago N. Caldeira, ed. Nova Publishers, 2009.

Working Papers

"International Water Contracts and Household Outcomes: Evidence from Albania" joint with Andrew Bacher-Hicks (under review)

"State-Level Employment Protection and Inward Foreign Direct Investment in the U.S." with Ivan Kandilov and Mine Senses

We estimate the effect on measures of inward foreign direct investment of three wrongful discharge protection measures---the good faith (GF), implied contract (IC), and public policy (PP) exceptions---adopted by U.S. state courts during the last three decades (Autor et al. 2006). Theory predicts that by varying the cost of labor force adjustment these laws may alter the incentives of a foreign firm investing in the U.S. Foreign investment serves as a source of high-skill jobs in many states, meaning this question should be of primary importance to policymakers.  We measure foreign direct investment using both state-level employment in foreign affiliates and gross value of foreign owned plant, property, and equipment. Further, we control for a variety of time varying state characteristics including wages, levels of unionization, public support of industry, and a measure of market proximity. Because U.S. states share many unobservable characteristics, this approach avoids a number of the usual pitfalls of using country-level variation in employment protection. Preliminary results suggest that adoption of the IC exception reduces state employment in foreign affiliates by about 5 percent. This result is consistent with Autor et al. (2006), who find that the IC law lowers overall employment by about 0.8 percent to 1.6 percent. Importantly, these findings indicate that employment in foreign affiliates is more sensitive to the IC law than is overall employment. Our results show mixed evidence for the other two laws; their impact appears small.

Work in Progress

 "Response to Shifting Incentives Across the Income Distribution: Evidence from a State Lottery" with Jason P. Hulbert