Main Street Moves FirstArgues that everyday consumer and household behaviors shift measurably before a recession surfaces in official statistics. Drawing on nearly a century of data (1929–2025), it treats “Main Street” activity as a leading indicator and asks how early those behavioral signals can flag a downturn.
SSRN 5384415▸
Research
The work, on the record.
Fourteen public papers on SSRN, grouped by method and subject — from topological risk detection to measurement integrity, labor economics, energy systems, and algorithmic governance.
Cluster 01
Topological & Pattern-Based Methods
Persistent homology, geometric indices, and behavioral signals — detecting structure before the official statistics register it.
Topological Signatures of Structural RiskApplies persistent homology — a tool from topological data analysis — to detect regime-dependent structure in trade networks and catastrophe-loss fields. The work shows how the shape of the data, rather than its summary statistics, can carry early warning of structural stress.
SSRN 6299678▸
The Industrial Curvature IndexIntroduces a geometric index that measures the “curvature” of industrial structure as a proxy for accumulated stress. It proposes the index as a way to see strain building in an economy before it registers in conventional aggregates.
SSRN 6700358▸
Cluster 02
Measurement Integrity & Statistical Artifacts
Where headline metrics mislead — survivorship bias, statistical artifacts, and miscalibrated performance thresholds.
The Texas Employment MirageExamines how statistical artifacts, fiscal transfers, and selective measurement can inflate regional development claims. Using Texas as a case study, it separates genuine employment gains from accounting effects and political narrative.
SSRN 5348869▸
Below the WaterlineInvestigates how employer attrition and survivorship bias hide regional economic deterioration from standard indicators. Surviving firms paint an overly healthy picture, while the failed establishments — the part “below the waterline” — go uncounted.
SSRN 6682020▸
Performance Measure Calibration in Workforce ReemploymentA methodological assessment of the Texas 10-week reemployment threshold used to judge workforce programs. It asks whether the chosen cutoff actually measures performance or simply rewards how the metric itself is defined.
SSRN 6737339▸
Cluster 03
Labor, Human Capital & Workforce Policy
How education, immigration, wage, and workforce rules interact to shape opportunity for domestic workers.
The Education Arms RaceAnalyzes how credential inflation and import competition interact to erode the economic value of education. It frames rising credential requirements as an escalating “arms race” that can leave workers worse off than before.
SSRN 5333429▸
The Human Capital Destruction MachineArgues that contradictory U.S. policies — across education, immigration, trade, and labor — systematically disadvantage domestic workers. The paper treats these crosscutting rules as a single system that quietly degrades human capital.
SSRN 5358667▸
The Precarity ParadoxShows how WIOA workforce policies, intended to help vulnerable workers, can instead create unintended barriers to stable employment. It documents the paradox in which protective rules increase precarity for the very people they target.
SSRN 5400805▸
Cluster 04
Trade, Fiscal & Energy Systems
Tariffs, property-tax structure, and petroleum-inventory dynamics weighed against their claimed outcomes.
The Tariff MirageCompares the stated goals of second-term trade-war tariffs against their measurable economic effects. It traces where political claims about tariffs diverge from outcomes in prices, trade flows, and employment.
SSRN 5358663▸
Property Tax Caps, Urban Growth & the Density MythTests the claim that higher urban density drives prosperity, using evidence from Texas cities and beyond. It examines how property-tax caps interact with growth and challenges the density-as-prosperity assumption.
SSRN 5373138▸
Petroleum Inventory TrajectoriesModels petroleum-inventory dynamics under a hypothetical 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It projects how stocks would draw down over time and what the trajectory implies for supply resilience.
SSRN 6737518▸
Cluster 05
Algorithmic Society & Governance
Recommendation algorithms, political coercion, and the blind spots of siloed institutional oversight.
From Crowds to CodeTraces how recommendation algorithms turn crowd behavior into algorithmic echo chambers that can normalize coercive political suppression. It connects platform design to the gradual narrowing of acceptable political expression.
SSRN 5584211▸
Siloed OversightExplains why clean audits can coexist with serious misconduct in international humanitarian aid. It argues that siloed, compartmentalized oversight leaves blind spots that formal audits never reach.
SSRN 6008354▸
Engage
Bring a problem worth sharpening.
If a result here maps to something you are working on, tell us the shape of the problem. We respond with how we would approach it and what reproduction would require.