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Works in Progress

Proactive and Reactive Infrastructure Investment

Maintaining infrastructure requires investment. Faced with uncertain quality degradation, managers can either invest proactively to prevent failure or reactively to address problems. Using a new dataset on drinking water systems, I construct and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of infrastructure investment. Simulation results indicate that investment is currently too low to prevent system quality decline. Proactive-promoting policies facilitate the prevention of most health-based violations but leave some systems vulnerable to extreme quality decline. By contrast, reactive-promoting policies lead to milder but pervasive violations. A policy that increases proactive investment and reserves a safety net of reactive support enables all managers to sustain functional infrastructure.

Technology and Market Power: The United States Cement Industry, 1974-2019 (with Nathan Miller, Matthew Osborne, and Gloria Sheu)
Reject and Resubmit, American Economic Review, 2023.

We examine the evolution of market power in the cement industry over more than four decades using a structural model of procurement. The model matches aggregated outcomes in the data, and implies transportation costs, shipping distances, and demand elasticities that are consistent with external sources. Evaluating county-level outcomes throughout the contiguous United States, we find that market concentration and markups increase but that prices do not rise. We attribute these patterns to a technological innovation—the precalciner kiln—that lowered variable costs, increased plant-level capacities and economies of scale, and contributed to an industry shakeout in which many plants closed.

Phoning Home: The Procurement of Telecommunications Services for Prison Systems in the United States (with Nathan Miller and Marleen Marra)

When incarcerated individuals in the United States purchase goods and services, they do so from monopoly vendors selected by their correctional authority. We study the case of inmate calling services (ICS), where the Federal Communications Commission has recently characterized prices as “exorbitant” and where commission payments from the winning provider to the facility are common practice. We obtain and analyze data from public records requests that we submitted to all fifty states, and estimate the demand function based on sudden, drastic price reductions in two state prisons. We estimate providers’ latent costs using a novel first-score auction model with evaluation uncertainty and multi-dimensional bidder types. Counterfactual policy simulations show that regulating call rates reduces commissions while also increasing the market power of the winning provider.

Low-Carbon Investment and Climate Policy (with Sarah Armitage, Nathan Miller, and Matthew Osborne)