I am a professor of economics at UC Irvine. I am also a research fellow at IZA. My current research interests are causal identification and inference, treatment effect models and public policy evaluation. I am particularly interested in extending causal identification to be valid under more general conditions and finding novel solutions to identification problems that may not fit in the standard toolbox. A defining feature of my research is that most of my econometric work is grounded in prominent empirical issues, as I tend to concern myself with empirical phenomena first and then work toward finding econometric solutions. On the applied side, I have broad interests in education, labor and health topics.