Research

Working Papers

The Hidden Interaction: Household Consumption and Advance Information about Future Income

[Job Market Paper – Link to paper]
This paper studies how advance information about future labour income affects current household consumption. Combining a nonlinear panel method with structural modelling, I discover a positive correlation between current consumption and future persistent income changes. My results suggest that households with advance information are better self-insured against persistent income shocks due to anticipatory consumption smoothing. Furthermore, I find that the established understanding on the prevalence of income risks may be systematically distorted when the existence of advance information is not properly recognized.

The Evolution of Canadian Income Dynamics: Evidence from Canadian Longitudinal Tax Records

with Brant Abbott
[Preliminary Draft – Link to paper]
What does income dynamics look like for Canadian-born workers since the 1980s? We address this question by estimating a flexible nonlinear income model using panel data constructed from Canadian administrative tax records. A novel feature of our approach is the introduction of a proxy variable for post-secondary education attainments imputed from historical records of education deductions and tax credits.

The Many Misspellings of Albuquerque: A Comment on ‘Sorting or Steering: The Effects of Housing Discrimination on Neighborhood Choice’

with Areez Gangji, Sunny Karim, Anthony McCanny and Matthew D. Webb
Revise and resubmit, Journal of Political Economy.
[Link to paper]
This comment revisits the analysis in Christensen and Timmins (2022). We identify two critical errors used in the original analysis, one with the data and the other with coding. When either error is corrected several major results in the paper change, either in statistical significance or in effect size.

Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope

with Abel Brodeur, Derek Mikola, Nikolai Cook, et al.
Revise and resubmit, Nature.
[Link to paper]
This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments.

Shi Chen