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, 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 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—in which case, these models can favor punishment defaults that induce opt-out. 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. Once frictions are not limited to deviating from the default, the case for punishment defaults weakens.
Snavely Prize for Outstanding Dissertation Proposal, UVA; Snavely Prize for Outstanding 2nd-Year Summer Paper, UVA; Snavely Outstanding Dissertation Award.
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 Withdrawals: Automatic Enrollment as Working-Life Liquidity Insurance.”
Standard models of saving in retirement accounts trade off diminished working-life liquidity due to withdrawal penalties against resource accumulation for retirement. This paper shows that, for passive savers, automatic retirement saving can expand working-life access to liquidity. I study state auto-IRA programs, which generate quasi-experimental variation in retirement account wealth through automatic enrollment. I find that each additional dollar of induced IRA wealth raises withdrawals by 36 cents in years with large earnings declines, with no comparable response in normal earnings years. This state-contingent pattern indicates that induced retirement balances are used for consumption smoothing during adverse earnings states rather than primarily reflecting regret-driven leakage. I develop and estimate a welfare framework with earnings risk, incomplete precautionary saving, limited displacement of other saving, and withdrawal frictions and calculate that, net of offsets, the average working-life liquidity value of each dollar of induced IRA saving is $0.16. These findings inform the conventional view of retirement account design. When individuals face frictions to active financial adjustment or do not fully build liquid precautionary wealth, automatic retirement saving can provide both retirement resources and working-life liquidity, while those same frictions partially substitute for the formal commitment generated by account illiquidity.
“Winners and Losers of Employer Stock Ownership Plans,” with Elena Derby and Kathleen Mackie.
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are tax-advantaged retirement plans through which firms compensate employees with company stock and transfer ownership to workers. This paper studies the incidence of ESOP adoption across employees and firms. 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 compare them to similar non-adopting firms through 2024. We find that ESOP adoption increases wages for incumbent employees but decreases wages for non-incumbent employees, while increasing retirement wealth for all employees. A compensation-accounting exercise that combines wage and retirement effects implies that incumbent employees gain from ESOP adoption, while non-incumbent employees do not. For firms, ESOP adoption reduces tax payments, increases employment, and is associated with higher valuations, with little change in profits per worker. These findings imply that the gains from ESOP adoption are distributed unevenly across worker cohorts. The results for non-incumbent employees are consistent with workers valuing the non-pecuniary benefits of ESOP participation.
Invited presentations: National Tax Association Annual Meeting, Joint Committee on Taxation.