About me

I am on the 2025-26 Job Market and a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics at Brown University with interests in applied microeconomics. My research covers topics in the economics of education and urban economics. My active projects are:

• leveraging text analysis methods to generate novel measures for evaluating racial or gender bias in standardized reading tests
• examining the effects of zoning regulations on both market-rate and subsidized housing in the US
• identifying the role of sewer infrastructure in explaining urbanization across developing countries

I am affiliated with the Population Studies and Training Center and Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) at Brown University. Prior to graduate school, I was a predoctoral research fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), mentored by Susan Athey, and completed a B.S. in economics and applied & computational mathematics at Brigham Young University.

Contact: matthew_schaelling@brown.edu