Working Papers
- Beyond the Flypaper Effect: Crowding-In from Federal Investment in Public Transit
Job Market Paper
Draft now available!Abstract
I examine how targeted federal grants affect state and local spending on public transit. The analysis uses comprehensive U.S. expenditure data from 2000–2019 and exploits an exogenous shock from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA funds were apportioned to Urbanized Areas through preexisting formula programs, independent of potential changes in transit investment. Using ARRA apportionments as an instrument, I find that each $1 of exogenous federal grants generates a $0.20 annual increase in capital transit spending from all sources. This average effect reflects two distinct phases between 2009–2019: an initial rise in federally funded expenditures with no displacement of state or local spending (the flypaper effect), followed by substantial crowding-in of state funding to the same localities. I develop a conceptual model of local officials’ investment decisions that distinguishes between guaranteed and flexible funding from each source, the latter requiring costly negotiation. In this framework, the initial flypaper effect arises from the stickiness of guaranteed funds, while the subsequent state crowding-in results from increased negotiation for flexible funding. This negotiation can be driven by two mechanisms: (i) higher returns to additional investment or (ii) lower costs of negotiation. Empirical evidence on the nature of additional spending rejects the first mechanism, while cross-state variation in institutional settings supports the second. Taken together, these results suggest that federal grants empowered local officials to secure additional flexible state funding by reducing the cost of negotiation, leading to a disproportionate and persistent increase in total public transit spending.
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In the Weeds of Traffic Fatalities: Revisiting the Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws
Reject and Resubmit at the Journal of Law and Economics
DraftAbstract
This study re-examines the finding by Anderson, Hansen, and Rees (2013) that medical marijuana laws decrease traffic fatality rates by 10.4%. I demonstrate that legalizing states were already experiencing declining fatalities prior to legalization, even after controlling for state-specific linear trends in a Two-Way Fixed Effects model. To address these pre-trends, I apply the Imputation Procedure (IP) by Borusyak, Jaravel, and Spiess (2024), which estimates state-specific trends using only not-yet-treated observations. Depending on the inclusion of potentially confounding covariates, my IP estimates suggest either a 12% increase or a zero effect on fatalities. I also show that the average state effect differs substantially from the average individual effect, indicating large heterogeneity across states. Much of the original negative result is driven by California, which accounts for over half of the population-weighted estimate. This state consistently exhibits one of the largest estimated negative effects and one of the steepest negative pre-trends.
Work in Progress
Pressure to Spend: Transportation Project Selection under ARRA
Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Transportation FellowshipWhere the Road Leads: Can Infrastructure Investment Drive Technology Adoption?
With R. Benjamin RodriguezFeudalism and Democracy: Evidence from Weimar Germany
With Kartikeya Batra, Ethan Kaplan & Weizheng LaiBureaucrats in Fiscal Federalism