About me

I recently joined the Department of Finance at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business, after graduating from the Department of Economics at Brown University in May 2026.

I am an applied microeconomist whose 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

During my PhD, I was affiliated with the Population Studies and Training Center and Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) at Brown University, and was a student fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men. 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@byu.edu