About

I am a PhD student in economics at Brown University, working in labor economics, applied econometrics, and applied macroeconomics. My current research asks what happens to local labor markets once a large layoff has been announced, and how far the effects spread.

Before graduate school, I spent two years as a senior research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I graduated from Harvard College in 2022 with Highest Honors in Economics.

Portrait of Brendan Chapuis

Research

Research in progress

Announced Layoffs and Local Labor Markets: Timing, Persistence and Spillovers

Firms must give advance legal notice of large layoffs under the WARN Act. I use the dates of these notices for hundreds of large layoff events in more than 20 U.S. states (2004–2019) to estimate how announced layoffs affect county employment, using a within-state matched event-study design. The paper follows the loss from the day of the notice through three years, and separates losses in the affected industry from spillovers to other sectors and to nearby counties.

The Declining Price of Density: Sorting, the Density Gradient, and the Limits of the Remote Work Shock

This paper estimates how the wage premium for working in dense areas has changed since 2005, and asks how much of that change can be attributed to the rise of remote work.

Draft

Publications

Measuring Unemployment Risk

With John Coglianese. FEDS Notes, 2024.

We estimate each worker’s unemployment risk from CPS microdata using cross-validated gradient boosting, and show that these risk estimates made in advance line up with the unemployment patterns that follow.

Undergraduate thesis

Senior honors thesis, Harvard College

Advised by Gordon Hanson. Harris Prize.

Using a shift-share instrument and confidential CDC mortality data, the thesis finds that long-run negative labor demand shocks increase overdose mortality.

Teaching

Brown University

Instructor, ECON 2020: Computational Methods for Economists

The required first-year PhD course covering R, data analysis, and reproducible workflows. I am redesigning half of the course around AI-assisted research, with an emphasis on verifying results and keeping them reproducible.

Course website

Spring 2027

Howard University

Teaching Assistant, Econ 181: Exploratory Data Analysis with R

Fall 2023

Projects

Hivewire

Co-founder, 2025–present

Hivewire is an LLM-powered news platform. I designed and built its pipeline, which uses language models and embeddings to process thousands of news articles each day and cluster them into deduplicated stories. I have iterated on the prompts and architecture to improve accuracy while keeping inference costs under control.

hivewire.news

WARN Notice Register

Open data project

I built a daily pipeline that collects WARN layoff notices from about 47 state portals and standardizes them into a single format. The public database now holds more than 90,000 notices dating back to 1987.

Project website

Background

Brown University

PhD in Economics (expected 2029); MA in Economics (2026)

Fields: applied econometrics, labor economics, applied macroeconomics, and text analysis. Trainee at the Population Studies and Training Center.

2024–present

Federal Reserve Board of Governors

Senior Research Assistant, Labor Markets Section

I researched U.S. labor-market dynamics with senior economists, built the data pipelines and labor-market datasets behind policy analysis and the Board’s internal forecasts, and contributed to the Nonfinancial Briefing given to the Chair and Governors before FOMC meetings.

2022–2024

Harvard College

BA in Economics, minor in Government

Graduated with Highest Honors in Economics and received the Harris Prize for the best senior honors thesis.

2018–2022

Honors

St. Gallen Symposium Global Essay Competition

Top 100

Essay

2025