I study how technological change and public policy affect workers and households. My research combines quantitative models and household panel data to examine labor reallocation, taxation and social insurance, and decisions about borrowing and saving.
Why can displaced workers find new jobs quickly and still experience lasting losses? In a quantitative model of automation and worker mobility, unemployment and moves into less familiar tasks erode the skills workers can use in their next job. I compare skill-transfer programs that help workers recover productive capacity with unemployment insurance that cushions income losses.
I study how tax evasion changes who ultimately bears capital taxes when households earn different returns on their assets. In a model calibrated to U.S. evidence, replacing capital income taxation with a revenue-equivalent wealth tax reduces concealment. The transition analysis traces how gains and losses differ between households alive at the reform and future households.
We study unsecured credit markets in which some borrowers underestimate their exposure to penalty fees. These fees can subsidize lower interest rates for other borrowers. In the model, clearer contracts and fee caps help borrowers who underestimate their risk and raise interest rates as the cross-subsidy shrinks.
In the British Household Panel Survey, people who expect their finances to worsen are more likely to report saving at the interview when they state that expectation and less likely to report saving at the next interview. I compare the two conditional associations using the same respondents, forecast, and saving measure.
I use a quantitative labor-market model to study how basic income changes workers’ education and job-search decisions and firms’ investment in robots. The model distinguishes the welfare effects for cohorts alive when the reform begins from those for future generations.
When studies average household-level consumption-equivalent welfare changes, the ranking can depend on the allocation used to express those changes. I study when a policy remains the preferred choice across economically defensible references, with applications to tax progressivity and housing-tax reform.
This project studies how uncertainty about future economic conditions affects the evaluation of tax and debt reforms. A model with overlapping generations helps assess how leaving room for future fiscal adjustment interacts with the value of public debt as a liquid asset for households.
This project studies how a wider range of discretionary goods shapes saving for a first home. The model connects everyday spending opportunities to the timing of homeownership.