Students

My name is Ana Bottega and I'm a PhD Student in the Department of Economics at the University of São Paulo (USP). I'm also a researcher at the Research Center on Macroeconomics of Inequalities (Made/USP) and a working group coordinator at the Young Scholars Initiative of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (YSI/INET). I visited the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University from February to March of 2023.

I currently work on topics at the intersection between public finance, macro, and labor economics, mostly focusing on inequality. I am particularly interested in the distributional consequences of different tax policies and in the racial and gender components of income inequality.

My research interests lie at the intersection of public finance, macro, and labor economics, with a particular emphasis on taxation and inequality, including its gender and racial compositions. I am particularly interested in studying the case of Brazil, my home country. Despite recent improvements, Brazil still has one of the highest income concentrations globally, with non-white women being overrepresented in the lower income deciles. Through my research, I aim to hopefully shed light on issues within these topics and contribute to informing policy decisions.

My current research broadly investigates the distributional impact of different tax policies. First, I'm currently documenting racial and gender top-income inequality in Brazil, combining data from household budget surveys with tax and national accounts data. Second, I'm also one of the developers of the first open-access tax-benefit microsimulation model for Brazil, which will be a valuable tool for assessing the distributive and budgetary impacts of a range of policies. Finally, my main project is to analyze the effects of the 2012 Brazilian payroll tax cut on racial earnings disparities, focusing on the benefits to exporting firms.

Contact: anabottega@usp.br 

As a teenager, I was quite the activist - I expected studying critical theory in Frankfurt to be the obvious progression after my high school graduation in 2017. However, I ended up being drawn to the quantitative side of sociology, thus transfered to Heidelberg University after only one year. 

In Heidelberg, I became quite involved in the labour struggle of student researchers and ended up representing them at the state level in the German service sector union for two years. This spurred my interest in industrial relations research, and academic research more broadly. I had already added an econ undergrad to my studies to learn more about quantitative methods, and hence decided to continue on that path after graduating from Heidelberg in econ and sociology 2021. 

During a masters in economics at the LSE I started working as RA in economic industrial relations. After my graduation last summer, I continued this RA work and enrolled in the graduate program of Bonn University. As of this semester, I am a visiting research student at UC Berkeley. I will most likely not continue past the course work in Bonn but transfer to another institution in 2024. 

My research interest is motivated by my experience as a trade unionist. I view my dissertation and research program in general as using quantitative tools to understand the influence of worker power on both the creation and distribution of wealth. 

In a current project we use administrative trade union data to analyse sectoral bargaining. We track strikes and connect them to bargaining outcomes. I want to use this data to inform a more general theory of sectoral bargaining. In another project, a co-author and I assess a natural experiment which gave German workers in some industries "true codetermination" - a 50/50 power sharing agreement with capital, which goes beyond the minority-vote agreements which have previously been studied. 

Other areas that fascinate me are the complex role of migrant workers in Germany as well as the earlier history of organised labour before the second world war. Another topic that has featured prominently in my policy work, but so far not in my research, is the transition to a carbon neutral economy. 

Contact: busch@iza.org

My name is Fiona and I'm a second-year PhD student in economics at Harvard! I'm originally from the Bay Area of California, and I went to MIT for undergrad. I love art museums, music (of all genres), exploring new cities, spin class, and noodle soups. 

I'm interested in labor, public, and behavioral economics. Currently, I am working on research on the effects of firm governance models on labor outcomes, the effects of AI technologies, the effects of legal aid in civil court settings, and the determinants of homelessness.

Contact: fionachen@g.harvard.edu 

I am a Ph.D. student at the Munich Graduate School of Economics in Germany since January 2021. I am also an affiliated doctoral student at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm and at ifo Institute in Munich. 

Before starting my doctoral studies, I completed a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich. During this period, I spent time abroad at the University of Warwick in England and at Stockholm University in Sweden. 

My main research interest is wealth and income inequality. I am part of the DINA-team for Sweden. We are combining individual-level data from various administrative as well as private, corporate registers to construct new evidence on income and wealth inequality levels and trends in Sweden from 1968-2022. Specifically, I am using supervised learning algorithms to create individual-level series that are consistent both cross-sectionally and in the time series dimension even for earlier years, where data availability is more limited. 

In my future work I intend to use our database to analyze wealth and income mobility patterns using life-cycle outcomes and intergenerational correlations. Also, I am particularly interested in capturing top wealth holders and their behavioral responses to policy reforms.

Contact: felicia.doll@ifn.se 

I am an economics PhD student at Johns Hopkins focused on labor economics, currently finishing up my second year. I grew up in a big family in Virginia and have lived in Philly, Boston, and now Baltimore. Outside of economics, I like to bike, camp, and do things outdoors, play music, and explore Baltimore. Before and during undergrad I worked in restaurants and I still really enjoy cooking. Other interests and hobbies are languages (I love to practice my Spanish), watching basketball (go sixers!), and playing tennis.

I am broadly interested in labor economics. I enjoy computational methods and so my research interests mostly fall in "structural" labor, particularly work using life-cycle models. I am also interested in how education effects and is effected by inequality, specifically in how it can be both a powerful tool for young people to improve their labor market outcomes as well as for the socioeconomically privileged to perpetuate that status for their children. In my second year paper, I estimate a model of consumption and labor supply with human capital and examine changes to the human capital production function to evaluate the skills-biased technological change hypothesis.

Contact: jgree199@jh.edu 

Kassandra Hernández is a rising third-year doctoral student in Economics at UC, Berkeley. Prior to the PhD, Kassandra was a Research Analyst at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute, focusing on economic mobility and opportunity, along with the impacts of COVID-19 on Latina labor force participation and unemployment. Her work has been covered in both English and Spanish media and was presented to members of the U.S. Department of State. She holds a Master of Public Policy (MPP) and a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Labor & Workplace Studies, both from UCLA, and is an alumna of the American Economic Association Summer Program (AEASP). She is a proud (Southern) Californian, daughter of Mexican immigrants, and first-generation college student. She spends her free time reading, running, hiking, cooking, and baking— and is always excited about exploring new coffee shops with friends! 

As a daughter of Mexican immigrants in agriculture and domestic work, Kassandra’s background fuels her research interests: labor, immigration, policy, and inequality. As an aspiring Labor and Public Economist, she is working on launching projects that demonstrate her commitment to advancing our understanding of inequality, at the intersection of race/ethnicity and immigrant status within the labor market and society at large. She is particularly interested in low-wage labor markets, along with role of government in including or excluding individuals from social safety net benefits, financial aid, and other resources otherwise available to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. 

Contact: kassandra.hernandez@berkeley.edu 

I'm an incoming PhD student at MIT. Currently, I work as a research assistant for Simon Jäger, studying wage-setting and labor market institutions. Previously, I did a master's degree at MIT and was a research assistant for Mordecai Kurz at Stanford, working on a book about rising monopoly power and the falling labor share. I grew up in Colorado, and did undergrad at the University of Colorado, and I love all the typical Colorado activities (running, hiking, skiing).

I am primarily interested in firm-level determinants of wages and markdowns, and how worker bargaining power matters for wage inequality. In one project, I am studying how much switching costs influence wage markdowns, and whether workers grow attached to their current firms so it is costly to switch. With Simon Jäger, I am working on how sectoral bargaining can have spillovers to other firms and workers in the industry not covered by the agreement. I am also studying optimal unemployment insurance design: whether benefits should be flat or rise or decline over time. The declining benefit gives more incentive to search, but distributes more to the short-term unemployed who need it less.

I am also interested in capital taxation and collecting the tax deficit of multinationals, and am working on a project about sales factor apportionment, a way to assess tax corporate taxes based on the share of sales located in a given country instead of the reported location of their profits. US states use this method to assess corporate taxes, and we're studying whether it affects the location of firms' sales.

Contact: nlazarus@mit.edu 

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the London School of Economics. Before starting my PhD studies, I worked for the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate on the development of the OECD-UNSD Multinational Enterprise Information Platform, as well as creating seasonal adjustment models for trade data. I also worked as a Research Assistant at Université de Paris-Saclay on a project identifying gender differences towards risk aversion. I hold an MSc in Economics from the LSE, funded with a scholarship from the Bank of Spain, and a dual BSc in Economics and International Studies from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

I am interested in optimal taxation, access to public goods, and gender policies facilitating work-life balance. For instance, I want to build upon Saez & Stantcheva (2016) work revealing society's preferences about institutional configuration and unequal distribution of wealth. Their work assumes away preferences for whether taxpayers are also more deserving of the public goods that are financed via levied taxes. I would like to use a survey approach to simultaneously infer broader preferences for both optimal taxation and optimal public goods supply.

I would also like to study the evolution of Spanish wealth and income distributions. Spain is a country that is undergoing an increase in wealth-to-income ratios, low fertility rates, population ageing and decline in inheritance taxes. Hence, I am interested in examining which patterns in long-run inequality would exist if the current transmission behaviors and policies (such as the inheritance tax and pension regimes) do not change significantly. 

Contact: c.machicado-alvarez@lse.ac.uk 

Originally from Boston, Garry grew up in Oxford and is now studying and researching at Stanford University, where he is double majoring in honors economics and honors political science with a minor in mathematics. He is a Research Assistant at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), the Stanford King Center on Global Development and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he is conducting research on three centuries of historical international capital flows and cross-border corporate taxation.

For the past three years, Garry has been conducting independent theoretical and empirical research on wealth and income inequality as part of his development of an award-winning theory of ‘The Evolution of the Global Political Economy’, which he has presented and published at international conferences in London, Chicago, Vienna and Budapest, receiving a special commendation in a national PhD research competition. While in high school at Eton College in the UK, he won a John Maynard Keynes prize for this research which he was honored to have sent to Eton’s 600-year-old archives to sit beside Keynes’ own student work. He is hoping to continue his research in a PhD in political economy at either Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT or PSE.

Garry’s research on ‘The Evolution of the Global Political Economy’ explores how wealth is created and distributed within and between nations by capturing both the symbiotic competition between capital and labor within nations as well as between liberal market economies (LMEs) like the US and UK which focus on capital and efficiency and coordinated market economies (CMEs) like Japan and Germany which focus on labor and equ(al)ity. He formally models how these different forms of advanced political economy function, create performance differentials and co-evolve within a finite market environment.

The political-economic-ecological ecosystem is modelled as a multi-predator-prey system of ‘inter-species’ competition between LMEs and CMEs using a continuous time deterministic stock-flow-consistent state-space model of systems of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. These equations of motion are numerically simulated, generating the dynamic behaviour modes of overshoot and collapse, limit cycles and deterministic chaos. The model mathematically derives and numerically simulates Piketty’s inequality equation (r>g) and evaluates redistribution policies designed to mitigate inequality.

The results demonstrate that while LMEs initially outperform CMEs when global economic growth rates were high throughout the 20th century, the converse is true when growth rates are low as humanity faces the increasing political-economic-ecological challenges of the 21st century.

Contact: garry.piepenbrock@stanford.edu 

Beatriz Rache is a first-year PhD student at UCLA Anderson, in the Global Economics and Management area. Before UCLA, Beatriz was a researcher at the Institute for Health Policy Studies, in Brazil, a Business research associate at the JPMorgan Chase Institute, in DC, and also worked at Gavea Investments and the Climate Policy Initiative. She has a MA in Economics from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).

My research interests revolve around studying multidimensional inequalities and mechanisms that would help alleviate them. The first topic is mobility and higher education. In the past, I computed returns to higher education in Brazil over a period of expanding access using quantile regressions, and found a faster decline in returns at the lower end of the income spectrum. This is suggestive of an expansion process led by lower quality institutions, which reinforces the higher education system’s regressive nature. I am now interested in calculating intergenerational mobility indicators by university using linked administrative datasets. Another interest is how inequality interplays with the gig economy rollout in emerging countries. Finally, I am also interested in the interlink between economic inequality and health.

Contact: Bzrache@gmail.com 

I am a second-year graduate student in economics at Harvard. Prior to graduate school, I completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney, and worked as a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at Opportunity Insights, a research center studying intergenerational mobility in the U.S. 

My main research interests are in public economics, theory, and macro-labor. I am interested in applications of each of these fields to the study of inequality, using a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches. 

Contact: jstratton@g.harvard.edu 

Hi, I’m Alex, a 2nd year Econ PhD student at UChicago. I’m originally from Stamford, CT but I’ve lived in Chicago for the last 7 years or so. I enjoy hiking, traveling, and learning new languages. Looking forward to meeting everyone this summer.

Right now, I am exploring the downstream labor market and goods market effects of White Flight in the US. Did access to good jobs, quality schools, and healthy food flee the city along with the White residents? Why did firms move to the suburbs? I am currently trying to digitize Illinois business license data from this period in order to answer these questions. 

I also am interested in questions related to local taxation and public good provision. What is the optimal local mix of property, income, and consumption taxes? How do policies such as rent control interact with local public good provision and local taxes? 

How do place-based policies affect the targeted neighborhood? How do policies like public housing and transportation investment affect segregation, racial inequality, and local amenity access? I am trying to study these questions both in contemporary Chicago and in historical WW1-era government programs.

Contact: weinberga@uchicago.edu 

I'm a first-year Ph. D. student studying Economics at UC Berkeley. Before graduate school, I worked as a research assistant under Professor Emmanuel Saez to study the progressivity of the tax system and measures of economic inequality. I have also spent time at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago and Cleveland.

I am primarily interested in public economics. My recent research has focused on historical origins for geographic disparities in economic opportunity and how social beliefs impact tax compliance.

Contact: akcan.balkir@berkeley.edu 

Javier is at the 4th year of the PhD in Economics at University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA from Universidad de Buenos Aires and a MA from Universidad Torcuato DiTella. His areas of research are at the intersection of Public Finance, Labor and Development Economics. He mainly focuses on employer-employee collusion to evade taxes and how this collusion breaks down. Moreover he is working on entrepreneurship topics, such the value added of networks on startups performance; as well as the role of education on shaping different type of entrepreneurs.

I investigate stories of trust between employers and employees that can lead them to engage in illegal behavior, how government budged is affected and its implication for efficiency and income distribution. 

Contact: jfeinmann@berkeley.edu