My research interests focus on the economics of education, health economics, experimental economics and empirical microeconometrics. I have recently become interested in understanding how methods in data science and analytics compare to traditional econometric approaches as well as exploring biomarker data.


Several of my published and working papers are available to download from this page. All the documents are in pdf format and for those papers that were published I also include a link to the final version which may require a paid subscription to access. Since I may not update this page in a timely manner, please send me an email if there are other specific papers or more recent drafts that you are interested in. I welcome any comments and suggestions.






  • Labor Market Consequences of Pay-equity Laws


  • Waiting for the Right Offer: Laboratory Evidence on How News Affects Bargaining


  • Breaking Barriers: The Impacts of Employer Exposure to Immigrants


  • Algorithms for Predictive Analytics: Communication, Privacy and Weights


  • Estimating Context-Independent Treatment Effects in Education Experiments


  • Anticipating the (un)expected: Evidence from introducing a universal childcare policy with a shortage of spaces

  • The Bigger Picture: Combining Econometrics with Analytics Improve Forecasts of Movie Success and Supplement to this paper

  • Multiple Testing and the Distributional Effects of Accountability Incentives in Education and Supplement to this paper

  • Box Office Buzz: Does Social Media Data Steal the Show from Model Uncertainty When Forecasting for Hollywood? and Supplement to this paper    Published version

  • Does Adding Social Media Sentiment Upstage Admitting Ignorance when Forecasting Volatility

  • Does High Frequency Social Media Data Improve Forecasts of Low Frequency Consumer Confidence Measures?*

  • How Skills and Parental Valuation of Education Influence Human Capital Acquisition and Early Labor Market Return to Human Capital in Canada    Online Appendix    Published version Note a minor error appears in the superscripts of equation 3

  • How Do NYPD Officers Respond to Terror Threats?    Online Appendix   

  • Does Selective Crime Reporting Influence our Ability to Detect Racial Discrimination in the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk Program?    Published version

  • Targeted or universal coverage? Assessing heterogeneity in the effects of universal childcare    Published version

  • Are genetic markers of interest for economic research? (open access)

  • Cohort of birth modifies the association between FTO genotype and BMI (open access)

    • IZA
  • Does Quebec's Subsidized Child Care Policy Give Boys and Girls an Equal Start?, a supplement to this paper and    Published version,

  • Do the Perils of Universal Childcare Depend on the Child's Age?    Published version

  • New Evidence on the Impacts of Access to and Attending Universal Childcare in Canada    Published version

  • Estimating Treatment Effects from Contaminated Multi-Period Education Experiments: The Dynamic Impacts of Class Size Reductions    Published version

  • Experimental estimates of the impacts of class size on test scores: robustness and heterogeneity    Published version

  • Understanding the role of time-varying unobserved ability heterogeneity in education production    Published version

  • Do Peers Affect Student Achievement in China's Secondary Schools?    Published version

  • Genetic Lotteries within Families    Published version

  • The Impact of Health on Academic Performance: New Evidence Using Genetic Markers    Published version

  • Worker Sorting and Health Insurance Coverage: Evidence from Displaced Workers    Published version

  • Time preferences are reliable across time-horizons and verbal vs. experiential tasks   

  • Bargaining and Reputation: Experimental Evidence on Bargaining in the Presence of Irrational Types    Published version, Supplement to this paper and Corrigendum corrects an error in the units of the delay variable reported

  • Bargaining in Legislatures: An Experimental Investigation of Open versus Closed Amendment Rules    Published version

  • Randomization, Endogeneity and Laboratory Experiments: The Role of Cash Balances in Private Value Auctions    Published version

  • Matching using Semiparametric Propensity Scores    Published version

  • The Impact of Social Networks on Labour Market Outcomes: New Evidence from Cape Breton    Published version

  • Raging Hormones in Puberty: Do They Influence Adolescent Risky Behavior?

    • lehrers@queensu.ca index.htm
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