Research
Working papers
“It Only Takes OneBite: Attention Shocks in Local Markets.” (New Draft!).
Job Market Paper
Presented at: 60th Canadian Economics Association Meetings
Abstract
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How do digital media platforms redirect attention and influence consumer choice? I investigate a novel setting and evaluate how online attention from a OneBite pizza review impacts consumer decisions and firm performance. Using variation in the review upload dates, I find that review scores ≥8.0 increase customers at the reviewed pizzeria by an average of 43% over the first three months following the review, while scores <8.0 have no significant effect. Although a high-score review only directs attention to a single establishment, I show that the consumer response generates positive spatial spillovers onto nearby drinking places, consistent with consumer-based agglomeration from the shared customer base. Despite the initial increase, the attention does not create sustained growth as customers return to their pretreatment level within four months. To uncover the mechanisms that explain the consumer response, I develop a theoretical framework and decompose the response into three channels: awareness, information, and prestige. While the higher response from non-local consumers highlights the role of product awareness, I find consumers do not respond to new information about a product's quality. Instead, the prestige from visiting a viral establishment explains 83% of the immediate consumer response.
“Braking Habits: The Impact of Leading Pedestrian Intervals.” (New Draft!).
Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Public Economics.
Presented at: 19th North American Meeting of the Urban Economics Association
Abstract
After introducing traffic safety measures, motorists often adopt riskier driving habits that offset the intended safety improvement. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in Toronto, I investigate how leading pedestrian intervals, advance walk signals that provide pedestrians a head start when crossing an intersection before motorists, impact pedestrian safety and influence motorist behaviour. I estimate that leading pedestrian intervals decrease the probability of a pedestrian collision at an intersection by 39%, with a 56% decrease in the likelihood of a pedestrian fatality or major injury. Rather than a behavioural offset, I determine that leading pedestrian intervals elicit a positive behavioural response from motorists to improve traffic safety.
Works In Progress
“The Wheels on the Bus Go First.”
with Devin Bissky-Dziadyk
Abstract
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This paper estimates the effects of transit signal priority (TSP) on traffic congestion, public transit efficiency, and commuter modal choice. TSP is any mechanism or policy that gives priority to public transit vehicles at signalized intersections, ahead of private vehicles. While passive TSP includes signal coordination along transit routes that are optimized for transit, the recent transit expansions in Toronto have generated a call from the public to revisit and update the transit signal priority measures. As part of the City of Toronto's MoveTO 2021-25 action plan to modernize Toronto's transportation system, the City of Toronto introduced Advanced Transit Signal Priority (ATSP). ATSP mechanisms undertake measures to aid individual transit vehicles by detecting the vehicles when they approach the intersection. For example, signal pre-emption measures detect when a transit vehicle is approaching the intersection and keep the traffic signal green until the transit vehicle is through. We construct a new comprehensive dataset that combines minute-by-minute real-time public transit vehicle speeds and occupancy from GTFS data from December 2025 to September 2026, road-segment speeds from HERE Technologies from January 2017 to August 2026, and the location and installation date of every TSP intersection in Toronto. To investigate how TSP affects transportation networks within the city, we exploit the quasi-exogenous timing when the City of Toronto installs TSP at an intersection and use a staggered event study to evaluate the dynamic changes in both private and public traffic speeds, traffic congestion, and transit vehicle occupancy. With the plan to install ATSP at all traffic signals within the city, understanding the efficacy of transit signal priority is just as much an open and essential public policy question as it is an insight into how commuters make decisions.
“Urban Reserves.”
with Stephan Heblich
“Housing Affordability Under Tax Reforms.”
Other Projects
“Reproducibility and Robustness of Economics and Political Science Research.”
with Abel Brodeur et al.
Nature. April 1, 2026. Published Version.
Abstract
Science aspires to be cumulative. Reproducibility efforts strengthen science by testing the reliability of published findings, promoting self-correction, and informing policy-making. Computational reproductions, whereby independent researchers reproduce the results of published studies, are an essential diagnostic tool. Such efforts should have greater visibility. However, little social science reproduction and robustness has been conducted at scale. Here we reproduced original analyses and conducted robustness checks of 110 articles that were published in leading economics and political science journals with mandatory data and code sharing policies. We found that more than 85% of published claims were computationally reproducible. In robustness checks, our reanalyses showed that 72% of statistically significant estimates remain significant and in the same direction, and the median reproduced effect size is nearly the same as the originally published effect size (that is, 99% of the published effect size). Additionally, 6 independent research teams examined 12 pre-specified hypotheses about determinants of robustness. Research teams with more experience found lower levels of robustness, and robustness did not correlate with author characteristics or data availability.
“Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism: Best Practices and Standardizations.”
with Matthew John Cross.
Handbook of Security Science. September 28, 2022. Published Version.
Abstract
Preventing and/or countering violent extremism (P/CVE) involves the use of coercive or non-coercive means to dissuade individuals or groups from engaging in violent extremism and to mitigate recruitment, support, facilitation, or engagement of ideologically motivated terrorism by non-state actors. There is no defined set of practices, methods, or approaches used to evaluate the impact of P/CVE, but a rise in extremism, from the continued threat of Salafi-Jihadist terrorism to the rise of alt-right extremism, has forced practitioners in the field to understand who their target audience is before they begin the development of countermeasure programs. The following chapter sets out an approach for standardizing and regularizing a scope of best practices that should be used in the development of any P/CVE programs, using a simple checklist of five sequential steps that help to identify what P/CVE program is best used. This checklist will help identify the target audience, the use of prevention methods or countering methods, the type of engagement (direct or indirect), the type of program to be used, and the intricacies of the P/CVE program itself. These practices are supplemented by current examples of their use, and they will demonstrate how the wrong strategy applied to the wrong target can result in an ineffective program. This chapter provides a means for practitioners and academics to gain an introductory understanding of current best practices available for P/CVE across the spectrum of extremism and the ability for a simplified process to determine how to approach their own program’s target audience.
“Negative COVID-19 vaccine information on Twitter: content analysis.”
with Niko Yiannakoulias, J Connor Darlington, and Catherine E Slavik.
JMIR infodemiology. August 29, 2022. Published Version.
Abstract
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, have a role in spreading anti-vaccine opinion and misinformation. Vaccines have been an important component of managing the COVID-19 pandemic, so content that discourages vaccination is generally seen as a concern to public health. However, not all negative information about vaccines is explicitly anti-vaccine, and some of it may be an important part of open communication between public health experts and the community.
“Mortality, temperature, and public health provision: A comment on Cohen and Dechezlepretre (2022).” Working paper.
with Benjamin Couillard and Jonathan Hall.
I4R Discussion Paper Series.
Abstract
Cohen and Dechezleprêtre (2022) investigate the heterogeneous impact of temperature on mortality across Mexico, and how affordable healthcare services that target the low-income population attenuate the mortality effects of weather events. They find that while extreme temperatures are more dangerous than less extreme temperatures, the increased frequency of non-extreme temperatures mean these temperatures cause more deaths. First, we reproduce the paper's main findings, uncovering a minor coding error that has a trivial effect on the main results. Second, we test the robustness of the results to clustering at the state level, omitting precipitation, and using a different weighting scheme. The original results are robust to all of these changes.