I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. My research interests are in environmental economics, economic history, applied micoeconomics, and industrial organization. I am on the 2025-2026 Economics job market.

Job Market Paper

The Role of Incumbent Firms and Regulation in America's Natural Gas Energy Transition

This paper examines how incumbent firms' adoption of new energy technologies is shaped by the regulatory environment, focusing on the transition from manufactured to natural gas in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Using detailed, newly digitized panel data on municipality-level gas utility services, I exploit variation in pipeline proximity for municipalities along the pipeline's path and regulatory changes introduced by the Natural Gas Act of 1938 to investigate incumbent utility firms' decisions to switch from manufactured to natural gas. I find that incumbent firms delayed adopting natural gas during the initial unregulated period but accelerated adoption after the implementation of federal regulation. When considering the factors that predict early adoption by incumbents, ownership by a holding company is associated with switching before federal regulation, while higher switching costs are associated with switching after regulation. These results are consistent with federal regulation helping reduce the gap between regulated retail prices charged by gas utilities and previously unregulated wholesale pipeline prices, allowing incumbents to recoup switching costs, illustrating that coordination through regulation or holding company ownership can reduce uncertainty and expedite technological transitions.

Working Papers

The Effect of Centralized Regulation on Price and Product Quality: Evidence from the Adoption of State Utility Commissions in the Gas Utility Industry

In this paper, I re-evaluate the effects of the initial adoption of state regulation of public utilities, focusing on the gas utility market. While prior research has focused on prices, I consider the effects on both prices and product quality. I also implement a new empirical approach to better account for potential biases arising from differences in local economic conditions. Using novel digitized data, I find evidence that early state regulation may have allowed gas utilities to increase their monopoly power not by raising prices relative to those under municipal regulation but by allowing lower-quality gas. However, I also find that state regulators permitted smaller price increases in response to the input price shock caused by World War I, suggesting that regulatory constraints on firms changed over time. Additionally, I find evidence of increased regulatory frictions resulting from the move to non-local oversight. State regulation also introduced greater pricing flexibility through the adoption of block pricing schemes.

Works in Progress

The Effect of Centralized Regulation on Price and Product Quality: Evidence from the Adoption of State Utility Commissions in the Gas Utility Industry

While previous research has emphasized the positive economic impacts of the expansion of utility services in the early 20th century in the United States, less is known about household demand for utility services in this period. To address this gap, I model and estimate residential energy demand in 1935. I assemble and link three historical data sources. The first is the 1935-1936 Study of Consumer Purchases, which provides detailed information on household utility expenditures and demographic characteristics for a nationally representative sample. I merge these data with electricity price schedules from the 1935 Federal Power Commission’s Electric Rate Survey and gas price schedules from the 1935 edition of Brown's Directory of American Gas Statistics. This paper will be the first to estimate price elasticities for both gas and electricity in the early 20th century United States. These elasticities can then be used to calculate markups, providing new evidence on how early state regulation affected market power and informing the policy motivations behind the Public Utility Holding Company Act.

The Diffusion of Declining Block Price Schedules in the Manufactured Gas Industry

In 1910, only 15 percent of firms used block pricing, but by the mid 1910s its use spread rapidly; by 1929 more than 70 precent of firms had adopted it. This project examines how practices diffuse within industries. Specifically, I analyze the spread of declining block pricing schdules in the gas utility industry and which factors drove its adoption.

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