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:
“Passive Saving, Active Withdrawals: Automatic Enrollment as Working-Life Liquidity Insurance.”
Policies that encourage retirement saving are often evaluated by whether the balances they generate persist until retirement. This criterion overlooks the working-life liquidity value of saving in retirement accounts. I study state auto-IRA programs, which generate quasi-experimental variation in retirement account wealth through automatic enrollment, using an instrumented difference-in-differences design. I find that each additional dollar of induced IRA wealth from automatic enrollment raises withdrawals by 27 cents in each low-earnings year, with no significant response in normal earnings years. 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, showing that retirement-balance persistence alone provides an incomplete measure of the welfare benefits of automatic enrollment.
“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 is unclear which workers, if any, ultimately benefit from these subsidized transitions. Using Form 5500 filings linked to administrative tax return data, we construct an employee-employer 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 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.