Budgeting for bills: The impact on daily spending. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 244:107495. ISSN 0167-2681 (2026)
Abstract: This study investigates how consumers manage their budgets around bill payments. Using daily transaction-level data containing detailed expenditure records, I find that consumers are postponing non-bill expenditures until after a bill payment is made. I find that spending increases by 41% - 51% above average on the day of and days following a bill payment, compared to their spending before the bill payment. This behavior diminishes when consumers have sufficient liquidity before the bill payment but intensifies for individuals with longer pay cycles. Consumers making automatic bill payments do not show this behavior. These findings offer new empirical insights into how consumers adjust spending around bill payment commitments, with variation across liquidity, bill types, and pay cycles.
Effects of Local, State, and Federal Minimum Wage on Employment Growth among Teenagers in the Restaurant Industry (with Marta Podemska-Mikluch), International Advances in Economic Research (2020)
Abstract: Over the last 20 years, local municipalities have been implementing minimum wage ordinances at an accelerated rate. These local changes, along with state and federal minimum wage increases, are included in the examination of the impact of minimum wage hikes on employment growth of teenagers in the food services and drinking places subsector. While most minimum wage research focuses on employment levels, recent contributions highlight the importance of analyzing employment growth. Following this trend, this study focuses on teenagers within the restaurant industry to test for the impact of minimum wages on inexperienced workers. Using a distributed-lag model, the results show that an increase in a minimum wage reduces employment growth for teenagers within this subsector. The effects of minimum wages within this demographic were most strongly felt in the first three years following an increase in minimum wage. Specifically, the results show that a 10% increase in the minimum wage decreases the employment growth rate by approximately 2.27% over a period of three years.
New Evidence on Consumption and Income Dynamics from a Consumer Payment Diary (with Scott Schuh)
Presented at:
Economics of Payments XI - Bank of Canada, Fall 2022 (Presented by co-author)
NBER Innovative Data in Household Finance: Opportunities and Challenges, Fall 2022 (Presented by co-author)
The State of Financial Literacy in the Carolinas with Blain Pearson
Effects of Inflation on Consumption Inequality
Consumption and the Stock Market with Cody Adams, Alexander Kurov, and Scott Schuh
Constructing Integrated Household Financial Statements from Daily Transactions Data with Scott Schuh and Robert Townsend
Causes and Consequences of the Decline in U.S. Consumer Cash Use, 2008-2024 with Scott Schuh and Noah Carney
ASSA 2026 Annual Meeting (Scheduled)
Conference on Real-Time Data Analysis, Methods, and Applications: Czech National Bank (Spring 2025)
Center for Economic and Social Research (Spring 2025)
Federal Reserve Board of Governors: Monetary Affairs Workshop (Fall 2024)
Southern Economics Association: Household Finance Session Chair (Fall 2024)
Southern Economics Association (Fall 2023)
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia: Internal Presentation (Summer 2023)
Southern Economics Association (Fall 2022)
Western Economic Association International (Summer 2022)
Discussant: The importance of Commodity Terms of Trade Volatility (Tian Xia and Hang Zhou)
Research with Economists at Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, March 2025 - Present
Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Summer 2023 - April 2024
Assisted in research and compilation of West Virginia Economic Outlook 2020-2024 at the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER), West Virginia