Students

I am a second-year PhD student in Economics at Columbia University (Business Economics track). Before moving to New York, I studied in Italy, where I completed a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and an MSc in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University in Milan. Since 2021, I help organize the International Festival of Economics in Turin. Recently, I have worked on bureaucrats and public procurement, and on the labor market in Ukraine during the war. Outside academia, I enjoy cycling, hiking, and cooking.

My research interests are in public economics, labor economics, and industrial organization. I am particularly interested in how the design and implementation of government activity shape incentives and economic outcomes, both within the public sector and through interactions with private firms and markets. Topics include public procurement, bureaucrats, state capacity, outsourcing, public sector productivity, and technology in government. Although tax and transfer programs have been widely studied, much less is known about government as employer, producer, and purchaser, despite its large role in economic activity and the implications for efficiency and distribution. My goal is to provide rigorous micro evidence on how fiscal policy and government operations can be better designed to improve social welfare and the provision of public goods.

Email: giacomo.anastasia@columbia.edu

I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Barcelona. Before starting my PhD, I completed a master’s degree at University Carlos III of Madrid and worked as a research assistant at the International Tax Observatory, previously known as the EU Tax Observatory, and at the Bank of Spain. In these roles, I contributed to empirical research on taxation, fiscal policy, tax avoidance, and the design of the Spanish personal income tax.

My research interests lie in empirical public finance, with a particular focus on inequality, tax design, and tax compliance. I am interested in how households and firms respond to tax incentives and regulatory changes, and in the distributional consequences of these responses. My current work studies the incidence of personal and corporate taxation, including how tax policy affects effective tax burdens across the income distribution and how changes in factor prices may shape firms’ automation and labour-demand decisions.

Email:  sofiaballadares@ub.edu

Hi everyone! I'm a second-year PhD student in economics at Princeton. I grew up in California and Oregon, went to Brown for undergrad, and did my predoc at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. I'm looking forward to meeting you all!

My research interests are broadly in labor and public economics. Two areas I'm thinking about right now are criminal justice and family economics.

Email:  bricker@princeton.edu

Hi! I’m Bernardo, a first-year PhD student at University College London. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I hold a BA in economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a MA in Economics from FGV-Rio. Prior to joining UCL, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University, where I worked on topics of labor economics and econometrics. Currently on a sabbatical year from the PhD, I’m also working as a consultant at the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

My research interests lie at the intersection of labor and development economics, with a focus in combining empirical methods and structural tools to shed light on how economic policy can address key labor market challenges in developing countries. Specifically, I aim to study the interaction of labor market institutions and informality, and the role of labor market entrants’ job prospects in low- and middle-income countries in shaping life-cycle employment dynamics and, ultimately, inequality and development.

In my current work in progress, I explore the dual role that informal jobs may pose for unlucky cohorts entering the labor market during recessions. Informal employment may enable faster labor market entry, acting as a buffer against adverse business cycle conditions and potentially serving as a stepping stone toward more productive jobs. On the other hand, the unregulated and unproductive nature of informal jobs may dampen employment life-cycle dynamics for individuals who start their careers in the informal sector, generating persistent scarring effects throughout their labor market trajectories.

Looking forward to meeting you all soon!

Email:  bernardoestevesw@gmail.com

I am a PhD candidate in the Economics track of the Public Policy PhD program at the Harvard Kennedy School. My research focuses on migration responses to taxation, the political economy of tax composition, and the long-run impacts of racial violence.

Before beginning my PhD, I worked in applied economic and policy analysis roles at organizations including the World Bank, OECD, and U.S. Department of State. I hold an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and dual bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Letters from the University of Oklahoma.

In my free time, I enjoy learning languages (Russian, French, and German so far), backpacking, and playing guitar.

My research focuses on how governments use tax policy to shape economic conditions, with particular emphasis on migration, labor mobility, and redistribution. I combine methods from public economics and political economy to study the effectiveness and political feasibility of different tax policies.

My job market paper examines a 2019 Polish policy exempting individuals under age 26 from paying income tax. I estimate the extent to which the policy achieved its stated goal of reducing brain drain and international out-migration, using a difference-in-differences design combined with synthetic cohort analysis. Preliminary results suggest that the policy had minimal effects on migration behavior. In future work, I plan to estimate revenue losses.

Other areas of my work include the political causes and consequences of tax composition, particularly how reliance on indirect (i.e. consumption) versus direct (i.e. income) taxation shapes governments’ redistributive capacity. Using both historical data from U.S. states and cross-country data, I study how tax structures affect the amount of revenue governments redistribute. I also have a co-authored paper that causally estimates the long-run costs of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Email:  lkincaide@g.harvard.edu

Emily Honda Lemmerman is a Ph.D. student at the MIT Sloan School of Management's Institute for Work and Employment Research, where she is an MIT Presidential Fellow. Her research interests are around how labor market institutions, including firms, governments and unions relate to economic inequality and stratification.

Before MIT, she worked as an organizer with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and as Communications Director for New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. These experiences inform her perspective on the need for academic work on labor and inequality to reckon seriously with political feasibility. Her predoctoral research spans Princeton's Eviction Lab, where she studied the connections between housing instability, health outcomes, and inequality and Stanford's Computational Policy Lab, where she worked on statistical analyses of discrimination in the criminal justice system and the persistence of modern-day debtor's prisons in the U.S.

She holds a B.A. in Sociology with honors from Stanford University.

My research interests center on how labor markets drive inequality and how unions, firms, and labor legislation can counteract it. In my dissertation, I hope to examine what kinds of firm investments in automation lead to layoffs and the trajectories displaced workers follow. 

I am currently working on a project examining variance in union wage premia using U.S. administrative data linkages, relating these differences to union strategies. I am also working on a cross-national comparison of how much inequality is mediated by specific pre-distributive labor market policies versus redistribution; as well as an analysis of how inflation relates to inequality in the modern era. 

Email:  elemm@mit.edu

I am a second-year PhD student in economics at Harvard University. My research lies at the intersection of labor economics, public economics, and the economics of AI. Prior to Harvard, I earned an MA in Economics and a BA in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

My research lies at the intersection of labor economics, public economics, and the economics of AI. Currently, I am most interested in the effects of AI on labor market outcomes and inequality.

Email: guylichtinger@g.harvard.edu

I am a third-year Economics PhD student at UC Berkeley. Originally from Ottawa, Canada, I have lived in the U.S. since 2017. I received a BA in Economics and an MA in Public Policy from Stanford University, where I worked on the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) and the Educational Opportunity Project. Before beginning my PhD, I spent two years in Washington, DC as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution's Center on Health Policy. I am a 2025 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Policy Research Scholar.

My research interests span public finance, labor economics, and industrial organization, with a particular focus on the link between health and economic inequality.

Email:  jgparis@berkeley.edu

I am a second-year economics PhD student at Columbia. Before moving to New York, I lived in San Francisco. Outside of economics, I like to listen to a wide variety of music and to read fiction. 

I am interested in topics in labor economics, public economics, and political economy. My work studies how whether and how inequality affects the government’s responsiveness to the public’s interest. I hope to contribute to our understanding of how to design of governance to be more robust to the influence of a wealthy few. I am motivated by a concern that the current political climate and policy regime is, at least partly, a manifestation of the interests of the wealthy. Most recently, I’ve been learning about the Civil Rights movement and residential racial segregation. I am learning about how segregation and white flight have shaped the provision of public goods in the modern era.

Email: as7469@columbia.edu

I am a rising fifth-year PhD student in economics at the University of Maryland studying public finance and economic history. Prior to graduate school, I worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board focusing on bank mergers and acquisitions. Originally from Pittsburgh, I am an avid sports fan, and I proudly support the Pirates, Penguins, Steelers, and Riverhounds. Outside of research, I enjoy cooking with friends, following the English Premier League, and spending far too much time thinking about historical archives and historical economic measurement.

My research interests lie at the intersection of public finance, inequality, and economic history. I study how taxation and institutions shape the accumulation and transmission of wealth over time. One area of my work examines behavioral responses to estate and gift taxation, with a focus on charitable giving, private foundations, and donor-advised funds. A second strand studies the historical origins of inequality through slavery, inheritance, and colonial institutions in early America using newly digitized archival data.

More broadly, I am interested in the measurement of wealth and living standards in historical settings. I enjoy combining archival research with modern empirical methods to recover long-run patterns in inequality, fiscal capacity, and economic development. Across projects, I am motivated by understanding how institutional choices persistently shape the distribution of economic resources.

Email: atucker9@umd.edu

I am a PhD student in Economics at Sciences Po (Paris) under the supervision of Clément Imbert. I hold a BSc in Economics from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an MSc in Economics and Finance from the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) in Madrid. Before starting my PhD, I was a Pre-Doctoral Research Assistant at the Hub for Equal Representation (H.E.R.) at the London School of Economics, working with Nina Roussille on a project studying gender gaps in early-career labor market outcomes among college graduates in Pakistan. The project follows students from graduation into the labor market and examines why men and women with similar work aspirations, job applications, and job offers end up with very different employment outcomes. In particular, it studies how the timing of job search and marriage-market expectations contribute to the emergence of the gender gap shortly after graduation.

My research interests are in labor and public economics with a focus on inequality, discrimination, and spatial frictions in labor and housing markets. One strand of my research studies how public transport connectivity affects local labor market size and gender gaps in employment. In particular, I examine whether improvements in access to bus stops reduce commuting constraints and increase female labor market participation. Another strand of my work studies discrimination in rental housing markets, using high-frequency listing data and correspondence experiments to measure how overt ethnic restrictions and applicant identity shape housing access and prices. More broadly, I am interested in how public policies, in the presence of social frictions, affect economic opportunities across different socio-economic groups. My work combines multiple sources of highly geographically granular data to causally answer these questions.

Email: viktor.veterinarov@sciencespo.fr

I am a PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics, advised by Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, working on the political economy of inequality. My research examines how concentrated wealth shapes democratic institutions, both through visible channels like campaign finance and lobbying and through subtler ones like the framing of policy debates and the narratives that make some options thinkable and others not. My current projects examine donor behaviour around U.S. political scandals and the political economy of AI in journalism. Alongside my academic work I write on economics for The European Correspondent. Previously I studied in Zurich and worked both at the World Inequality Lab and with Dina Pomeranz (UZH) on state capacity questions in low-income countries. I grew up between Switzerland and Poland, and outside research, my passions are contemporary art, hiking, and theatre.

The questions that fascinate me are usually related to political power and how it transcends national borders while shaping within-country inequality. How do ultra-wealthy individuals and multinational firms come to exercise capacities that exceed those of the democratic institutions meant to govern them? I focus on two primary mechanisms: policy capture through lobbying, and narrative capture through media influence. These channels reshape labor markets, innovation incentives, and the range of policies societies consider viable. I use quasi-experimental methods combined with text-as-data approaches to identify causal mechanisms and measure narrative influence. My current work examines campaign finance dynamics in response to political scandal, an RCT testing AI editorial assistance in newsrooms, and the political economy of tax havens. Beyond traditional terms, the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few firms presents new governance challenges. I want to understand how democratic institutions can effectively control and regulate concentrated technological power in ways that serve broader economic and social interests.

Email: stanislaw@zytynski.ch