J. Landin Smith

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley and my research interests are in history, development, and labor economics. My advisors are Barry Eichengreen, Enrico Moretti, Chris Walters, and Edward Miguel. 

My job market paper studies the role of education in the development of the southern US economy. I use a model of spatial labor supply and demand to argue that the overall effect of education policy depends on the substitutability of skill, and I estimate the parameters of the model using a novel dataset of county-level compulsory schooling laws. I find that complementarities between skill groups led to higher wages for all following the adoption of compulsory schooling.