Tyler Hoppenfeld

I am an economist at NERA Economic Consulting in Auckland, New Zealand, joining the firm in February 2026. I recently completed my PhD in Economics at UC Davis, where my research examined how small market imbalances trigger systemic failures in two-sided matching markets—work relevant to competition analysis, market design, and regulatory policy.

My background includes published research with Harvard Kennedy School faculty (Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan Skinner) on healthcare economics, client-facing analysis for the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation that informed their scholarship program decisions, and technical expertise in causal inference, econometric modeling, and empirical analysis using Stata.

You can read more about my background on my LinkedIn profile.

Research & Publications

PARETO INEFFICIENT UNRAVELING IN MATCHING MARKETS
Job Market Paper, October 2024

When labor markets “unravel”—meaning workers and employers form contracts prematurely—the usual explanation is that firms lose the ability to identify and hire the best talent. My research identifies a different and more fundamental problem: unraveling prevents workers and firms from finding good matches based on their specific preferences for location, culture, and working style. I show that even small uncertainty about market conditions can trigger a cascade where nearly all participants rush to contract early, accepting poor fits to avoid being left unmatched—a rare example of market failure producing Pareto inefficient outcomes despite rational behavior.

GAUSSIAN ORDERED PREFERENCES AND CORE SIZE IN MATCHING MARKETS
Working Paper, June 2025

Develops a realistic model of preference distributions in matching markets and proves that when preferences follow this structure, the set of stable matchings is provably small. This has direct implications for market design: smaller sets of stable outcomes make truthful preference reporting incentive-compatible, explaining why some matching markets (like medical residencies) function well while others unravel.

RACIAL DISPARITIES IN HEART ATTACK MORTALITY
Co-authored with Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan Skinner. Insights in the Economics of Aging, University of Chicago Press (2017)

We demonstrate that persistent black-white mortality gaps are driven by social determinants of health rather than hospital quality differences, with implications for where healthcare interventions should be targeted.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Contact

Email: TgardnerH@gmail.com
Location: Auckland, New Zealand