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Works in Progress

Proactive and Reactive Infrastructure Investment

Maintaining infrastructure requires investment. Faced with uncertain quality degradation, managers choose to invest proactively to prevent failure or reactively to address problems. Using a new dataset on drinking water systems, I estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of infrastructure investment. Simulations indicate that tightening regulations without financial support increases failures and raises costs. Reactive projects enable timely intervention as systems approach noncompliance, reducing disparities stemming from income and size. Efficiently restoring compliance for all systems requires expanded proactive investment to maintain quality and an even greater increase in reactive funds to address unexpected failures.

Phoning Home: The Procurement of Telecommunications for Incarcerated Individuals in the United States with Nathan Miller and Marleen Marra

Incarcerated individuals in the U.S. purchase goods and services from monopoly vendors selected by their correctional authority. We study telecommunications services, which have come under bipartisan scrutiny due to the high prices inmates pay for phone calls. Prospective providers are evaluated on their technical capabilities, the prices they would charge, and the “commission” they would pay the correctional authority. Using data from public records requests, we estimate a first-score auction model with evaluation uncertainty and multi-dimensional bidder heterogeneity. Our results indicate that reducing the role of commissions in procurement lowers prices, whereas increasing competition among providers mainly raises commission payments. Moreover, recently promulgated federal regulation that bans commissions and caps prices likely preserves providers’ profitability.

Technology and Market Power in the Cement Industry with Nathan Miller, Matthew Osborne, and Gloria Sheu
Resubmitted to American Economic Review

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. We find significant increases in local market concentration, but markups increase only modestly, and real prices do not rise. We attribute these patterns to a technological innovation—the precalciner kiln—that lowered variable costs, increased plants’ capacities and economies of scale, and contributed to an industry shakeout in which many plants closed.

The United States Paid Plasma Industry with Peter Jaworski and Kaitlyn Wilson

The Dynamics of Emissions Pricing and Technology Adoption with Sarah Armitage, Nathan Miller, and Matthew Osborne

Published Work

New Frontiers in Research on Industrial Decarbonization with K. Gillingham, L. Barrage, S. Armitage, D. Burtraw, J. Colmer, L. de Preux, J. Hawkins-Pierot, C. Holt, V. J. Karplus, A. Lofgren, R. Martin, N. Miller, M. Muuls, M. Osborne, E. Severnini, W. Shobe, V. Smirnyagin, T. Stoerk, A. Tsyvinski, K. Wagner, U. J. Wagner, and X. Wu. 2025. Science, 390(6771): 338-340.