Did Organized Labor Induce Labor? Unionization and the American Baby Boom
Conventional economic theories cannot fully explain the timing, duration, and size of the American Baby Boom. I propose a new explanation: the rise of the labor movement. Following the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, union membership rates more than tripled, and by the peak of the Baby Boom one-third of American workers were members of a labor union. To test unionization's contribution to fertility increases, I construct novel county-level estimates of union membership and exploit local variation in exposure to the NLRA shock. Union growth has positive impacts on both birth rates and completed fertility. Overall, unionization can account for approximately 20% of the overall increase in fertility during this period. Effects are driven primarily by wage growth, protection against adverse labor market shocks, and impacts on female labor force participation.

Can Moves to Opportunity Be Constructed? Evidence from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC)
-- with John Soriano and George Zuo
This paper investigates the causal effects of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC)--the largest and fastest-growing federal program financing the creation of affordable rental housing--on neighborhood quality and housing stability for low-income tenants. We link application and waitlist data from a large private developer of LIHTC-funded housing to administrative data capturing several decades of residential address histories. We leverage the developer's first-come, first-served allocation procedure as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in assignment to LIHTC-subsidized units, and estimate the causal impact on tenant-level outcomes using regression discontinuity and event study methods.