I am a 5th year PhD student in Economics at the London School of Economics. My research is in spatial and environmental economics, with a focus on how cities adjust to climate shocks.
I will be on the academic job market in 2026–27.
Working Papers
Dynamic Costs of Resource Shocks: Evidence from Cape Town’s Water Crisis (Job Market Paper)
Droughts are becoming more frequent, and cities facing them must decide how to divide a temporary cut in water between residential and commercial use. We study this choice in Cape Town's Day Zero crisis, where the city raised prices sharply to attenuate demand. Using the universe of formal employment, we find losses in water-intensive industries that lasted long after prices returned to normal, with the reduction in water use by firms coming from exit rather than substitution. Neither employment in water-intensive sectors nor the formal employment rates of workers displaced from them had returned to trend six years later. To measure the welfare cost of the implemented policy against alternatives, we build a dynamic spatial model of the city, with firm entry and exit and costly job switching. We find that a policy that shifted the cut toward households would have avoided nearly two thirds of the welfare losses from the drought.
Funders & Partners: STICERD, IGC, Weiss Fund.
Local Public Spending, Residential Sorting, and the Limits of Fiscal Redistribution: Evidence from London
The level of local public spending is a key input in local services, the quality of which can be capitalised into local house prices. I study London, where borough councils provide local services inside a common housing and labour market and where borough-tied housing and support hold a large share of residents in place. Using the 2010 reform to borough funding, I compare quality-adjusted house-price changes for homes near the same borough boundary but exposed to different spending shocks. I find that a 1 percent increase in borough spending raises house prices by 0.092 percent. I use this estimate to inform the parameters of a quantitative spatial model in which local government spending funds local public goods. I then use model counterfactuals to evaluate the welfare effects of the major funding changes under the announced Fair Funding Review reforms. Under full residential mobility, average welfare effects are small. With limited mobility, welfare differs by starting borough, as local price changes only partly offset the change in welfare from the local spending shock. For a resident who cannot move, about 70 percent of the welfare effect of the borough's funding change remains after prices adjust.
Work in Progress
Climate Security and Informal Settlements: Evidence from Sierra Leone
Funders & Partners: IGC, STEG, GSOS, STICERD, OPEC Fund, Weiss Fund, KCAI
Productivity and the Grid: The Welfare Cost of Spatially Unequal Electricity in Accra
Electricity supply in Accra is spatially unequal and unreliable. The central business district enjoys near-perfect reliability, while peripheral neighborhoods face frequent and unpredictable outages. I build a quantitative spatial equilibrium model in which electricity is a constrained production input and firm entry is dynamic: forward-looking firms choose where to locate based on the supply they expect each neighborhood to receive in the future. I estimate the model using nine years of feeder-level outage data from the Electricity Company of Ghana and use it to evaluate counterfactual policies. Because firms make location decisions based on expected future supply, credible announcements of future reliability generate welfare gains before any new capacity is built.
Funders & Partners: STEG, IGC.
