Where do ideas come from?

Economics treats ideas as the engine of growth, then files their origins under “exogenous.”

I think that's a cop-out, so I study the origins directly. My current work follows the question across four terrains: what happens when you pay people for ideas (a $20 GitHub sponsorship can crowd out the community work that open source runs on); how local governments in Brazil build — and lose — state capacity; how proximity moves invention between people; and how deep the roots go, down to our neural wiring. Underneath all four runs one conviction: as AI makes execution cheap, open ideas — inventions left in the commons — matter more than ever, yet we still provision public goods inefficiently. The work is figuring out how to provide them better.

I got here the long way: two degrees at Cornell (biometry & statistics, applied economics & management), a reproducibility stint at the American Economic Association, antitrust data science on healthcare mergers at Charles River Associates, and now the TIES PhD at MIT Sloan, where I get to spend my time thinking about questions in economics that explore the provision of innovation in public-goods ecosystems. Along the route I kept building things — R packages, mapping tools, LLM pipelines that read sixteen million paragraphs of Brazilian municipal gazettes — because the questions I like are the ones existing instruments can't measure yet.

Off the clock I collect cities and their transit systems, draw maps nobody asked for, and am perpetually one attempt away from biking hands-free.