Selected work
A compact, industry-friendly view of my research as applied measurement systems.
For each project: what was measured, how it was measured, and why it matters for product, platforms, and AI deployment.
1) Platform networks and information diffusion
Network structure, exposure, and diffusion in large social graphs
Relevance: recommender systems, virality, integrity, and growth dynamics
Homophily, Group Size, and the Diffusion of Political Information in Social Networks: Evidence from Twitter
Journal of Public Economics (2016) · with Brian Knight
- Builds large-scale network measurement to quantify how homophily and group size shape what people see and share.
- Connects network structure to diffusion outcomes that matter for feed ranking, polarization risk, and information reach.
Methods: network measurement, reduced-form causal inference, robustness across specifications
2) Behavioral signal processing and measurement
Extracting behavioral features from unstructured signals
Relevance: ML pipelines, feature engineering, human behavior analytics
Gender Identity and Mode-Switching Behavior: Evidence from the Human Voice
Working paper (last updated March 2023)
- Builds an end-to-end pipeline to measure latent behavioral switching in voice frequency patterns.
- Shows how identity, incentives, and context can be detected from high-dimensional behavioral signals.
Methods: signal processing, measurement design, large-scale observational analysis
3) Incentives, institutions, and distributional outcomes
Causal measurement in organizational and policy settings
Relevance: pricing & incentives, fairness, adoption, organizational design
Pay Transparency and the Gender Gap
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2023) · with Michael Baker, Kory Kroft, Alexandre Mas, Derek Messacar
- Evaluates how information policy (pay transparency) changes behavior and outcomes in labor markets.
- Demonstrates how measurement can isolate causal effects in complex, real-world environments.
Methods: quasi-experimental causal inference, robustness and sensitivity checks
The Impact of Unions on the Wage Distribution: Evidence from Higher Education
American Economic Review: Insights (2026) · with Michael Baker, Kory Kroft, Alexandre Mas, Derek Messacar
- Measures how institutional bargaining power shifts distributions, incentives, and within-firm outcomes.
- Focus on distributional impacts and equilibrium responses — directly relevant to marketplace and policy design.
Methods: quasi-experimental inference, distributional analysis