PhD Candidate
in Economics
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working at the intersection of applied microeconomics and economic history. My research asks how markets, firms, and networks reorganize when the world around them changes, spanning media industries and labor organization. I build my own datasets from historical archives, using AI-assisted digitization to surface records that have never been used in economic research. Before UIUC, I studied economics and mathematics at Beloit College in Wisconsin, and somewhere along the way, the Midwest became home.
Dan Bernhardt (chair) · Alex Bartik · Jorge Lemus · Lena Song
Disruption Without Destruction: Television Entry and the Reorganization of Commercial Radio
When television entered local markets, radio did not collapse. Using the FCC's 1948–1952 TV licensing freeze as a natural experiment, I find that radio stations reorganized their business models rather than exit: revenue shifted from network compensation toward local advertising. Effects were heterogeneous by market size: large markets severed network ties as TV substituted for radio's mass-audience reach, while small markets strengthened them, offering advertisers exclusive access to households without TV, a pattern consistent with complementarity. The paper shows that incumbent firms can survive disruptive entry by repositioning within the value chain rather than competing head-on.