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PUBLICATIONS
Blue Collar Booms and American Mortality: Evidence From the Fracking Revolution (with Paul Shaloka). [pdf] Accepted: American Journal of Health Economics
Agricultural Technological Change, Female Earnings, and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil. VoxDev
The Economic Journal [link]
Every Day is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-term Impact of Environmental Activism (with Daniel Hungerman). AEJ: Applied Economics [link]
Media: Le Monde, Notre Dame News
WORKING PAPERS
The Salience of Social Norms and Fertility: Evidence from Papal Visits (with Lakshmi Iyer and Paloma Moyano). [New Draft Coming Soon. Old Working Paper Version: Notre Dame Population Analytics Working Paper 2025-001]
Media: Notre Dame News; Crux
How do social norms affect fertility? We answer this question by examining the visits of Pope John Paul II to 13 Latin American countries, which reinforced the salience of existing Catholic norms. We find positive long-term effects on fertility. These are driven by first births and by those residing in a region that the Pope visited. Papal messaging matters: fertility increases more when the Pope mentions marriage or abortions and contraception and decreases with condemnations of pre-marital sex. Marriages increase with all three messages. Further, the effects are strongest for wealthier and more educated women, whose behavior is further from the Catholic social norm.
Within the Calculus of Conscious Choice: Industrialization, Religion, and Fertility Decline in Early 1800s France [link]
I examine whether the economic incentives generated by the First Industrial Revolution contributed to fertility decline, and how their effects depended on prevailing social norms. Using plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of steam engines and mechanized cotton spinning across French departments, I find that early industrialization reduced marital fertility, but only in less religious regions. These results suggest that economic incentives associated with early industrialization mattered for fertility behavior, but that their effects were conditional on the prevailing social context. More broadly, the findings show the importance of considering interactions between economic incentives and cultural constraints in shaping the fertility transition.