User:PatrickButton

I'm Patrick Button (he/they). I am an Associate Professor of Economics at Tulane University. I completed a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Irvine, a M.A. in Economics at the University of Toronto, and a B.A. Honours in Economics at the University of Regina. I am also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Affiliate at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.



I primarily research discrimination, especially in employment, and especially based on age and disability. I research discrimination two ways:

(1) I quantify discrimination using audit field experiments. I previously studied hiring discrimination against older workers using resume experiments, where we applied for jobs as younger and older workers to study age discrimination in hiring. I am also researching discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in access to mortgages and multiple types of discrimination in access to mental health care. ​ (2) I determine the effects of discrimination laws. I use variation in time and across states in discrimination laws to see if these laws improve employment and hiring. I also study how discrimination laws affect Social Security Disability Insurance applications for older workers and individuals with disabilities. ​ In other research, I quantified the (lack of) economic impacts of tax incentives for the film industry, by comparing filming location choice, employment, and business growth in the film industry and related industries after states adopted these aggressive subsidies.

I am looking forward to getting more involved in creating economics content on Wikipedia, especially content that improves diversity on Wikipedia (e.g., highlighting under-represented economists or topics).