CV¶

Download CV

Department of Economics
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York, 12604, USA
kcoombs[at]vassar[dot]edu
Github || Twitter

Employment¶

• Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Vassar College (2025–Present)
• Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Bates College (2023–2025)

Fields of Specialization¶

• Applied Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Labor Economics

Education¶

• Columbia University (2017–2023)

  • Ph.D. in Economics, May 2023
  • M.Phil in Economics, May 2020
  • M.A. in Economics, May 2019

• Macalester College (2010–2014)

  • B.A. in Economics
  • Magna Cum Laude
  • Departmental Honors
  • Robert L. Bunting Prize in Economics

Job Market Paper¶

"Crowding out crowd support? Substitution between formal and informal insurance"
Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Public Economics

Abstract:
Gifts and loans from friends and family play a largely unstudied informal insurance role in high-income countries, making it difficult to assess their implications for social insurance policy. I present new results on informal insurance paid via person-to-person (P2P) payment platforms using a survey-linked administrative bank transaction dataset covering 130,502 low-income users from the US who experienced at least one unemployment spell between July 2019 and September 2020. Event study estimates show average monthly inflows from all P2P platforms increase by $30, or 2% of lost earnings, one month after job loss before returning to baseline over 10 months. Single mothers and the long-term unemployed receive the largest increases, as do those living in high-income areas. I leverage three plausibly exogenous changes to federal pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) policy to estimate that UI benefits crowd out at most $0.04 of informal P2P transfers. Using the social insurance framework introduced in Chetty and Saez (2010), my crowd-out estimates indicate negligible welfare consequences for an additional dollar of benefits. Altogether these results imply that public UI benefits raise welfare by pooling risk across networks without reducing within-network targeting of informal insurance.

Publications¶

• "Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Earnings, Employment and Consumption"
  with Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu, & Michael Stepner
• AEA Papers and Proceedings

Working Papers¶

• "Effects of Pandemic Unemployment Policies on Consumption, Savings, and Incomes of Workers: Evidence from Linked Survey-Transactions Data"
  with Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu, & Michael Stepner

• "Scandal-driven Catholic school closures and charter school response: Dynamics of competition for educational services"

• "Hack-a-thons as a tool for community-engaged learning in data-driven economics coursework: A case study with the City of Lewiston"

• "For Whom the Boll Weevil Tolls: Causal Evidence on religiosity and the business cycle"

In Progress¶

• "The Price of Politics: How much are evangelical Presbyterians willing to pay to separate?"
• "Online Gambling Expansion and substitution in government revenues and household spending" (with Austin Smith, Peter Nencka, and Greg Madonia)
• "Direct rental assistance and the housing market: Evidence from a small urban environment" (with Anamika Sen)
• "Is there a flexibility-inequality tradeoff in crowdfunding? Measuring scaling of donations with shocks and social network income"
• "Asking or suing to pay the bills: Relationship between crowdfunding and personal injury lawsuits after unexpected medical bills" (with Brian Jonghwan Lee)

Invited Presentations¶

2023:
- Bates College
- Howard University
- Federal Reserve Board
- Federal Bank of Atlanta
- Federal Trade Commission
- Office of Tax Analysis
- Cornerstone Research

Conferences¶

Crowding out crowd support? Measuring substitution between formal and informal insurance
- LACDev Conference, Wellesley College (Sep 2022)
- LACPaL Conference, Smith College (May 2023)
- Science of Philanthropy Initiative, IUPUI (Sep 2024)
- Annual Conference on Taxation, National Tax Association, Detroit, MI (Nov 2024)
- Southern Economic Conference, Washington, DC (Nov 2024)

Price of Politics
- SSSR Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA (Oct 2024)
- Lunches on Causal Inference, Bates College (Mar 2024)

Catholic School Closures
- Maine Economics Conference, Bates College (Apr 2023)
- LACPaL Conference, Grinnell College (Jun 2024)

Pandemic UI Withdrawal
- AEA Papers & Proceedings, Online (Jan 2022)

Pandemic Policy Effects
- Innovative Data in Household Finance, Online (Dec 2020)

Grants, Fellowships, and Research Positions¶

• Community-Engaged Learning Course Development Grant, Bonner Foundation (Fall 2023–Spring 2024)

• $3,000 to further develop the hackathon model in the course Data Science for Economists

• Associate, Opportunity Insights (Spring 2020–Present)

• Research Assistant, Columbia University for Suresh Naidu (Spring 2020–Spring 2023)
• Research Assistant, Columbia University for Eric Verhoogen (Fall 2018–Spring 2020)
• Research Assistant, Federal Reserve Board (2015–2017)

Teaching Experience¶

Bates College
- Big Data and Economics / Data Science for Economists (Fall 2023–Spring 2024)
- Public Economics (Fall 2023)
- Senior Thesis Seminar (Spring 2024)

Columbia University
- Instructor of Record, Public Economics (Summer 2022)
- Data Teaching Fellow, Senior Seminars with Michael Best & Susan Elmes (2021–2022)
- TA, Perspectives of Economics with Suresh Naidu & Joseph Stiglitz (Spring 2021)
- TA, Economics of Race in the US with Brendan O’Flaherty (Fall 2020)

Federal Reserve Board (with Howard University)
- TA, Data Analysis and Financial Literacy in R (Spring 2017)

Macalester College
- TA, Principles of Economics with Amy Damon (Fall 2014)
- Supplemental Instructor, Intermediate Microeconomics with Sarah West (Spring 2013)

Advising¶

• Senior Thesis Advisor, Bates College (Spring 2024)
• Honors Thesis Committee Member for Nicholas Di, Macalester College (2021–2022)

Academic Service¶

Journal Referee
- American Economic Review: Insights
- Economic Inquiry
- Journal of Public Economics
- Industrial and Labor Relations Review
- American Economic Journal: Policy

Conference Organizer
- Liberal Arts College - Public & Labor Economics Conference (2024–Present)

Bates College
- Seminar Coordinator, Economics Department (2023–Present)
- Member, Data for Common Good, Harward Center (2024–Present)
- Member, Publicly-engaged Pedagogy Learning Community (2023–Present)

Columbia University
- Coordinator & Mentor, Economics Diversity Initiative (2020–Present)
- President & 2^nd-Year Rep, AGES (2018–2020)
- Coordinator & Mentor, AGES First-Year Mentoring Program (2018–2021)

Miscellaneous¶

• Nationality: United States
• Languages:
  • English (Native)
  • Spanish (Fluent)
  • Portuguese (Proficient)
  • Quechua (Basic)
  • French (Basic)
• Programming Languages: R, Python, Stata, Mathematica, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB
• Other Skills & Hobbies: Audiovisual production, video editing, game design, piano, guitar, voice (tenor)