Welcome!
I am an economist with 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.
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 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—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.
Works in Progress:
“Passive Saving, Active Withdrawals: Automatic Enrollment as Working-Life Liquidity Insurance.”
Policies that encourage retirement saving are often evaluated by whether induced savings persist until retirement and increase resources available later in life. This paper shows that balance persistence is not a sufficient statistic for welfare. I study state auto-IRA programs, which generate quasi-experimental variation in retirement account wealth through automatic enrollment. I find that automatically enrolled individuals draw down induced IRA wealth after exiting enrollment, but these withdrawals are concentrated in years with large earnings declines. Each additional dollar of induced IRA wealth raises withdrawals by 27 cents in low-earnings years, with no comparable response in normal earnings years. This state-contingent pattern implies that withdrawals from automatically generated retirement balances do not primarily reflect regret-driven leakage or premature dissaving. Instead, induced balances provide working-life liquidity when earnings fall and the marginal value of resources is high. To capture this fact, I develop and estimate a welfare framework with earnings risk, incomplete precautionary saving, displacement of taxable saving, withdrawal frictions, and endogenous balance depletion. Net of offsets, I calculate that the average working-life liquidity value of each dollar of induced IRA saving is $0.15. The findings suggest that, even when pre-retirement withdrawals attenuate induced retirement savings from automatic enrollment, these withdrawals may generate meaningful welfare gains if they occur in adverse earnings states. For passive savers, automatic retirement saving can therefore provide both retirement resources and working-life liquidity insurance.
“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) use tax preferences to transfer firm ownership to workers. Because ownership is transferred at a point in time but claims on that ownership are allocated over time to a changing workforce, it remains unclear which workers, if any, ultimately benefit from these subsidized transitions. Using Form 5500 filings linked to administrative tax return data, we construct an employeeemployer panel of firms that adopted ESOPs in 2009 or 2010 and compare them to similar non-adopting firms through 2024. ESOP adoption increases wages for incumbent employees but decreases wages for workers who were not established at the firm at adoption. Observed IRA balances after job separation increase for both groups. Combining the estimated wage and observed retirement-asset effects, we find that established workers gain overall, whereas less-established and subsequently hired workers do not. For firms, adoption reduces tax payments, increases employment, and is associated with higher valuations. At the same time ESOP-adopting firms have lower survival probabilities than matched control firms and pre-tax profits per worker change minimally. These results are consistent with tax-facilitated expansion and the capitalization of tax benefits from the ownership transition, with non-incumbent employees bearing part of the transition's cost. The findings show that policies subsidizing broad-based firm ownership can lead to uneven benefits across workers while expanding firms.
