About

Christopher Boone is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has been faculty since 2020. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University, earned in 2015, and has a background in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University, where he obtained both his B.S. in 2005 and M.S. in 2009. Boone's research interests primarily focus on labor market policy, economic history, and agriculture, with particular areas of specialization including inequality, technological change, and economic crises. His work explores various aspects of economic policy and labor dynamics, contributing to the understanding of unemployment insurance, tipping behaviors, and the political economy of discretionary spending. Boone has also engaged in teaching courses related to microeconomics and the modern service economy, earning teaching awards at Cornell University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Engineering
• Macroeconomics
• Marketing
• Psychology
• Economics
• Labour economics
• Economic growth
• Geography

Selected publications

• Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Aggregate Employment

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2021-04-30 · 25 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, there is no statistically significant impact of increasing UI generosity on aggregate employment. Point estimates are uniformly small in magnitude, and the most precise estimates rule out employment-to-population ratio reductions in excess of 0.35 percentage points from the UI extension. The results contrast with the negative effects implied by most micro-level labor supply studies and are consistent with both job rationing and aggregate demand channels. (JEL E24, E32, J22, J23, J65)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural Change and Internal Labor Migration: Evidence from the Great Depression

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2021 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  • Business

  Abstract We analyze sectoral labor reallocation and the reversal of urbanization in the United States during the Great Depression. The widespread movement to farms, which serves as a form of migratory insurance during the crisis, is largely toward farms with low levels of mechanization. In contrast, the mechanized agricultural sector sheds workers, many of whom reallocate into low-productivity or subsistence farming. The crisis perverts the normal process of structural change in which workers displaced by farm equipment are released into more productive occupations, suggesting that macroeconomic fluctuations are an important factor determining the labor market consequences of technological change.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication data for: Structural Change and Internal Labor Migration: Evidence from the Great Depression

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-08-29

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Boone, C. D. A., and Wilse-Samson, L. (2023). “Structural Change and Internal Labor Migration: Evidence from the Great Depression.” Review of Economics and Statistics 105:4, 962–981.

  PublisherDOI

• The Case of the Chelsea Grand: Card-Check Neutrality, Management Contracts, and The Duties of Owners and Operators

  Cornell Hospitality Quarterly · 2021-09-17

  article1st author

  This article examines the dispute between a hotel owner, operator, and union, and the subsequent litigation. The dispute centered on whether the hotel owner was bound by agreements made between its operator and the union, and whether the operator had a fiduciary duty to the owner. Courts found that the operator was a joint employer of the owner’s employees, and as a result, the owner was bound to agreements that the operator had made with the union. The owner, who did not want to be bound to the union agreement, subsequently sued its operator for alleged breach of fiduciary responsibility. The courts ruled that the hotel management agreement between the owner and operator created no agency relationship and thus no fiduciary duty on the part of the operator. We discuss the potential implications of these findings for union-management relations as well as owner-operator relations, with a specific focus on the implications for hotel owners in the labor context.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Tip Recommendations on Customer Tipping, Satisfaction, Repatronage, and Spending

  Management Science · 2020 · 71 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Marketing

  A field experiment involving 94,571 orders from 24,637 customers of an app-based laundry pick-up, cleaning, and delivery service examined the effects of various randomly assigned tip recommendations on consumers’ tip amounts, satisfaction ratings, frequency of return, and bill size. We find that tip recommendations affect tip amounts, but not customer satisfaction, patronage frequency, or bill size, which implies that neither the processes underlying the tip-recommendation effects on tipping nor consumer tipping itself affect these other consumer outcomes. From a practical perspective, these results and conclusions inform efforts to increase or decrease tipping. Recommending larger tip amounts, at least within the $2–$10 or 5%–25% ranges studied here, appears to be a safe means of increasing the amounts customers leave. More generally, altering customers’ tipping behavior will not itself adversely affect those customers’ subsequent satisfaction, repatronage, or spending, as long as the means used to alter tipping do not directly affect these other outcomes. This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

  PublisherDOI

• Farm Mechanization and Rural Migration in the Great Depression

  Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration (Cornell University) · 2019-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We study sectoral labor realloaction in the U.S. during the Great Depression by examining transitions between the farm and nonfarm sectors as well as movement within the farm sector. Towns and cities that are hit harder by the downturn see higher levels of out-migration to farms, suggesting that the widespread movement to farms serves as a source of migratory insurance. We also show that the more mechanized farming areas are far less able to provide this insurance function. In fact, while the subsistence agricultural sector gains large numbers of people during the crisis, the mechanized agricultural sector sheds workers. Instead of being released into more productive occupations, many of the workers leaving these mechanized areas are themselves moving into low-productivity or subsistence farming. This evidence suggests that economic downturns can interrupt the process of structural transformation and that the job losses associated with structural change may exacerbate the employment problem during economic downturns.

  Publisher

• Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Aggregate Employment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Essays in Agriculture and the U.S. Economy

  Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University) · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation studies the agricultural sector in the United States. The first two chapters investigate the U.S. agricultural economy during the Great Depression, while Chapter 3 looks at the effects of air pollution on crop yields in recent years. In Chapter 1, Laurence Wilse-Samson and I examine the widespread migration to farms in the U.S. during the Great Depression. We show that the option to move to farms serves as informal insurance during times of economic crisis, and that modernization in the agricultural sector reduces the ability of the land to provide this insurance function. The movement to farms also has spillovers on the broader economy, facilitating a decline in market-based expenditure and a shift into home production. At the same time, by absorbing surplus labor, the subsistence farm sector puts upward pressure on nonfarm wages and thus provides a countervailing force against deflation. We also provide evidence that the introduction of formal unemployment compensation reduces the movement to farms later in the decade. Our results bring attention to a less-studied effect by which formal insurance stabilizes the economy during deep crises: it increases market demand by diverting consumption away from home production and towards market-based expenditure. Chapter 2 examines the effects of the Great Depression on out-migration from farms, and how those effects vary across different groups of agriculturalists. Using complete count data from the U.S. population census, I match a sample of individuals from the 1930 census to their records in the 1940 census. Because the 1940 census includes information on location and farm status in 1935, this linked sample provides information on location and farm status for the years 1930, 1935, and 1940, allowing me to follow individuals over the course of the Great Depression. I show that farmers in mechanized agricultural regions are more likely to leave their farms during the crisis, compared to farmers in less mechanized regions, but they are no more likely to transition to the non-farm sector. While tenant farmers are in general more likely to out-migrate compared to farm owners, this differential is even larger in the more mechanized, high-productivity areas. And while farm owners from more productive regions end up earning higher incomes than owners in less productive areas, there is no corresponding earnings premium for tenant farmers. These results suggest that the benefits from productivity-enhancing technological progress accrue to the owners of the land resources, while the costs of the farm crisis (in terms of displacement) are borne heavily by renters. Finally, I show that places with high levels of farm mortgage debt experience higher rates of out-migration, and their residents report lower subsequent income; in addition, the negative effects of mortgage debt on income are more heavily concentrated among farm owners. In Chapter 3, Wolfram Schlenker, Juha Siikamaki and I provide new empirical evidence of a possible nonlinear effect of ozone on corn yields using data for the years 1993-2011 from a comprehensive sample of the Eastern United States that accounts for 91% of U.S. corn production. Our county-level panel analysis links observed historic corn yields to various air pollution measures constructed from fine-scaled hourly pollution monitor data. We find a statistically significant critical threshold of 72 ppb for hourly daytime ozone, considerably higher than the 40 ppb threshold derived in controlled experiments that is used as a standard in Europe. The reduction in peak ozone levels is responsible for 41% of the observed trend in average yields in 1993-2011. Our results improve the understanding of the benefits from environmental regulations and contribute to better projections of future agricultural yields and long-term commodity prices.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Have Minimum Wage Increases Hurt the Restaurant Industry? The Evidence Says No!

  Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration (Cornell University) · 2015-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Federal, state, and local laws in the U.S. specify the minimum wages to be paid in their jurisdictions. Recent years have seen an increased interest among many in raising those minimum wages, and there has been some movement at the local, state, and federal levels to do so.1 Proposals to increase the minimum wages have been opposed by the restaurant industry on the grounds that such increases would require restaurants to cut hiring, raise prices, or both.2 Either reaction is thought to reduce customer satisfaction and demand, as well as restaurant profitability and survival. Although this piece of conventional wisdom seems entirely plausible, we wanted to test whether this is the case, especially in view of studies that have found no such negative outcomes (or tiny outcomes, at worst). Consequently, in this report, we address the question of whether increases in the minimum wages have the negative effects widely expected by the restaurant industry.

  Publisher

• The Political Economy of Discretionary Spending: Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

  Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 2014-03-01 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We study in this paper the spatial allocation of expenditures in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), one of the largest discretionary funding bills in the history of the United States. Contrary to both evidence from previous fiscal stimulus programs and standard theories of legislative politics, we do not find evidence of substantial political targeting. The districts of party leaders did not receive more funds than those of rank-and-file legislators, nor did the districts of pivotal voters in the Senate or swing voters in the House receive more money. While Democratic districts overall received more per resident than Republican districts, this differential nearly disappears when we consider award per worker in each district or when we control for district poverty rate. Democratic states did receive modestly greater funds, but this is largely due to higher levels of funding going to places with more generous state welfare programs. At the same time, we find no relationship between the amount awarded and measures of the severity of the downturn in the local economy, while we do find more funds flowing to districts with higher levels of economic activity and greater incidence of poverty. The results are consistent with the discretionary component of ARRA being allocated through funding formulas or based on project characteristics other than countercyclical efficacy or political expediency, which stands in contrast to evidence from fiscal stimulus in the New Deal. One explanation suggests that over the past century, legislative norms have reduced the scope of discretion—with attendant benefits and costs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ethan Kaplan

  5 shared

• Arindrajit Dubé

  5 shared

• Lucas Goodman

  4 shared

• Laurence Wilse-Samson

  Columbia University

  4 shared

• David E. Sahn

  2 shared

• Michael Lynn

  2 shared

• Jong-Hwa Ham

  Korea Rural Economic Institute

  1 shared

• Joseph Park

  Scripps Institution of Oceanography

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• SHA Faculty Teaching Award, Cornell University, 2018–2019
• SHA Faculty Teaching Award, Cornell University, 2015–2016
• Center for the Study of Inequality Faculty Research Grant, C…
• Smith Family Business Institute Research Pioneer Fund Award,…
• ISS Small Grant, Cornell University, 2017