Welcome!
I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Virginia and a research analyst for the Joint Committee on Taxation. My work explores the intersection of public policy, behavior, and inequality, with a particular focus on taxation and retirement policy. Here, you can find my CV, recent research, and contact information. I will join the Joint Committee on Taxation as a full-time economist in 2026.
Outside of research, I enjoy kayaking, playing piano, running, and exploring western Virginia.
CV
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 and Optimal Default Design with Multiple Passive Choices.”
Automatic enrollment in employer-sponsored retirement plans is often found to have attenuating effects on saving. Using administrative tax records covering early-adopting U.S. states, I show that this attenuation does not extend to state auto-IRA programs: default effects produce persistent increases in retirement savings accumulation, with participants retaining their savings even after job separation. This contrast suggests that attenuation may be driven in part by institutional features of employer-sponsored plans rather than by stable features of saving behavior alone. Additionally, increasing the auto-IRA default rate causes many participants to exit default saving and choose a zero saving rate. To account for these patterns, I develop and structurally estimate a model with two competing passive options—default saving and non-saving—each associated with its own friction. Existing models of optimal defaults assume that passivity is exclusive to the default option, implying divergent optimal policies depending on whether default effects reflect welfare-relevant adjustment costs or behavioral biases. I show that this divergence can collapse when passivity is not limited to accepting the default: with multiple passive choices, the optimal default rate remains stable between 2.8% and 3.7%. This stability arises because changes in the default partially reallocate individuals across passive options rather than inducing large shifts toward active choice. The findings recommend a narrow range of moderate default rates, even if default effects reflect behavioral biases; in this case, the default rate acts as a second-best option that mitigates other distortions to saving behavior.
Snavely Prize for Best Dissertation Proposal, UVA; Snavely Prize for Best 2nd-Year Summer Paper, UVA
Invited Presentations: ICI Seminar Series (scheduled), ASSA Annual Meeting, National Tax Association Annual Meeting, Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting, Joint Committee on Taxation.
Works in Progress:
“Passive Saving, Active Liquidity: Automatic Retirement Savings as Working-Life Liquidity Insurance.”
Retirement accounts are designed to discourage early withdrawals and preserve resources for later life, yet withdrawals during the working life are common. This paper shows that retirement account wealth accumulated through automatic enrollment provides liquidity during working-life periods of low earnings. Using quasi-experimental variation in IRA wealth generated by state auto-IRA programs, I find that each additional dollar of induced IRA wealth increases IRA withdrawals by 29 cents in years with large earnings declines, with no comparable response in normal earnings years. This contrast suggests that induced retirement wealth is used to meet liquidity needs when earnings fall, rather than primarily because individuals regret having saved. Because adverse earnings events are common, the results suggest that a substantial share of the Roth wealth generated by automatic enrollment is used during working life rather than reserved exclusively for retirement. I develop a welfare framework that incorporates this liquidity channel and estimate that, net of offsets, the working-life liquidity value of each dollar of induced IRA saving is $0.16. These findings imply that evaluations of retirement saving policy should account for the working-life liquidity services provided by retirement account balances.
“Winners and Losers of Employer Stock Ownership Plans,” with Elena Derby and Kathleen Mackie.
Over fifty years ago, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), together with the Tax Reduction Act of 1975, created the option for firms to establish Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), allowing companies to compensate employees through allocations of firm stock. Despite this long history, there remains limited evidence on who benefits from ESOP adoption and what costs are incurred in return. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of firm and participant outcomes following ESOP establishment. Using Department of Labor Form 5500 filings matched to tax return data, we construct a panel of firms that adopted ESOPs in 2009 or 2010 and track their outcomes through 2022, comparing them to statistically similar non-ESOP firms. We find that ESOP adoption increases the wages of incumbent employees but decreases the wages of non-incumbents. We find evidence for moderate increases in retirement wealth for ESOP-enrolled employees, likely because of the forced savings aspect of ESOPs. Finally, we find that firms use the tax savings that come with ESOP adoption to increase employment and grow their valuations. Our findings indicate that ESOP adoption provides uneven benefits to employees, increasing the wages of only incumbent employees, slowing wage growth for new employees, and growing retirement wealth for all employees moderately.
Invited presentations: National Tax Association Annual Meeting, Joint Committee on Taxation.