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.

Hello!

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).