Welcome!
I am an economist at the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee of the U.S. Congress that provides analysis of federal tax legislation. As part of this work, I research a variety of topics at the intersection of public economics, labor economics, and household finance. Much of my work focuses on retirement-saving policy, with related research examining business taxation and employee ownership.
My research addresses three broad sets of questions:
How do individuals make saving, withdrawal, and portfolio decisions in environments where institutional frictions and behavioral biases shape financial behavior?
How do the multiple frictions surrounding default rules, non-participation, liquidity needs, and limited attention interact to impede active choice in complex institutional environments?
Who responds to—and who benefits from—tax policy and tax-favored institutions?
Across these projects, I use administrative data, quasi-experimental research designs, and economic models to connect observed behavior to policy and welfare.
Here, you can find my CV, current research, and contact information. Outside of work, I enjoy kayaking, playing piano, running, and exploring western Virginia.
Published Works:
“Corporate Behavioral Responses to TCJA for Tax Years 2017-2018”, with Tim Dowd and Christopher Giosa. National Tax Journal 73(4), December, 2020.
Working Papers:
“Automatic Enrollment, Opt-Out, and Optimal Default Design with Competing Frictions.”
How do automatic enrollment policies affect retirement saving, and how should default rates be set in the presence of saving frictions? Using administrative tax records, I study these questions in state auto-IRA programs. I find persistent increases in retirement saving, with participants retaining their balances even after job separation. However, higher default rates cause many participants to exit default saving and choose a zero net IRA saving rate, even when those participants have positive Roth IRA balances to draw on. To explain the empirical patterns, I formulate a model in which individuals incur frictional costs both when exiting default saving and when choosing a nonzero IRA saving rate. Existing models of default design allow a single friction-preferred choice, the default option, implying divergent optimal policies depending on whether default effects reflect real adjustment costs or behavioral biases. Structurally estimating the model with two friction-preferred choices, I find that the optimal default rate remains between 3.0% and 3.7%, whether default effects are interpreted as real or behavioral. This narrow range arises because changes in the default partially reallocate individuals between default saving and non-saving rather than inducing large shifts toward active choice.
Works in Progress:
“Retirement Saving as Working-Life Liquidity Insurance: Evidence from Auto-IRAs.”
How do automatically generated retirement savings affect financial security during the working life, and how should pre-retirement withdrawals enter evaluations of retirement saving policy? Using administrative tax data, I study saving and dissaving following enrollment in state auto-IRA programs, which automatically enroll workers into saving in a partially liquid Roth IRA. I find that auto-IRA exposure generates additional wealth, and some of this wealth is used to finance working life withdrawals. However, this dissaving is concentrated in low-earnings periods. Each dollar of wealth induced by auto-IRA enrollment is associated with $0.19 in additional dissaving during low-earnings periods, with no comparable response observed in normal earning years. To quantify the value of this state-contingent liquidity, I construct a welfare framework, and estimate a positive working-life liquidity value of induced IRA saving even when the marginal utility of consumption is only modestly higher in low-earnings periods. In the preferred specification I estimate a liquidity value of approximately $0.14 per dollar of induced IRA saving. Evaluations based solely on wealth retained until retirement omit this benefit.
“Who Gains from Employee Ownership? The Effects of ESOP Adoption on Workers and Firms,” with Elena Derby and Kathleen Mackie.
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are tax-subsidized retirement plans transferring firm ownership to workers. Using Form 5500 filings and administrative tax data, we compare ESOP adopters with similar non-adopting firms to determine which workers, if any, benefit from adoption. We find that incumbent workers experience gains in both wages and retirement assets, whereas newly hired workers experience net losses in compensation. For firms, adopting an ESOP leads to reduced tax liabilities, increased employment growth, and higher corporate valuations. However, ESOP adopters face lower long-term survival probabilities, and pre-tax profits per worker change minimally.