Russell S. Leonard

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at UC Irvine, specializing in applied labor/public economics and industrial organization with an emphasis on the economics of digitization. In general, I enjoy leveraging natural experiments and large datasets in novel settings to explore non-pecuniary decision-making. I'm advised by Jan Brueckner (chair), David Neumark, Matthew Harding, and Matthew Freedman. 

I am on the 2026-2027 job market.

My current research explores the internet, its infrastructure, and the associated market forces that shape relevant economic outcomes for individuals, households, and firms. 

In my job market paper, I explore the role that non-monetary incentives play in agents' production decisions in the context of YouTube, the largest video sharing platform and second most-visited website in the world. I exploit a change in YouTube's counting of "views" to show that a superficial increase in this salient, public measure of attention increases channels' output by about 9%. By inflating the perceived performance of brand-sponsored content, this change may have spurred additional output by sponsored channels. Additional analysis of an engagement metric  suggests that increased output may have come at the cost of content quality. The findings offer novel evidence that non-pecuniary platform features can meaningfully, if temporarily, move real effort.

In other ongoing projects, I am: (a) examining online toxicity using the random matchmaking process on Chess.com as a source of exogenous variation; (b) determining the degree to which cable broadband speeds competitively deter the expansion of fiber-optic networks using a historic, Bartik-like IV. My prior work can be found in Contemporary Economic Policy, Telecommunications Policy, and JAMA Network Open.