Hello! I'm currently a PhD student at Bocconi in Milan and am affiliated with LEAP in Milan and College de France in Paris. Previously, I worked as a Research Associate at the Good Business Lab in Bangalore. I graduated with an MA in Development Economics at Yale and an MSC in Management at ESSEC BS in Paris.

I am interested in development and public economics, with a focus on education and inequalities. In particular, I am interested in understanding how barriers to college education for low-income students reinforce economic inequality over time and across generations. Secondly, I am interested in people’s views on the fairness of income inequalities. 

Email:  raphaelle.aulagnon@phd.unibocconi.it

I am 31 years old, and currently doing an Economics PhD at Northwestern University. I did my BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics in The Hebrew University. I also completed an honors inter-disciplinary program in the humanities - Amirim. I conitnued to do an MA in economics in the same institution. During my time as an MA student, I worked as an RA for Professor Victor Lavy. Before studying, I worked as a parliamentary advisor to the chairman of the welfare, labor, and health committee, who also headed the committee to fight poverty. During this time had a role in shaping Israeli policy aimed to reduce poverty and inequality. Before taking this role I served as an intelligence analyst and commander. 

I am broadly interested in the intersection between economic history and political economics. Specifically, most of my projects investigate different aspects of inequality in various contexts. In one project I am studying how an economic crisis shifted attitudes toward redistribution in a socialist context - the Israeli kibbutzim. In a second project, I am investigating how the eleciton of female legislators in the US impacted reproductive regulation and find it had a downstream effect on the rate of abortions. In my primary project, I am studying the consequences of extending suffrage to poorer white males in early American history.

Email:  netanelben-porath2028@u.northwestern.edu

I am a first-year PhD Student in Economics at the University of Zurich. I am also a Visiting Fellow at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and affiliated with the CAGE Research Centre at the University of Warwick. Before starting the PhD, I worked as a pre-doctoral research assistant at the LSE and obtained BSc and MSc degrees in economics from the University of Bern. Outside of work, I enjoy traveling and doing all kinds of sports, e.g., football, squash, running, and skiing.

I study issues of taxation, inequality, and pension policy, typically involving the analysis of large administrative datasets. I am interested in how individuals and companies respond to tax and social insurance policies and how this affects economic activity and tax revenue. An overarching aim of my research is to disentangle real economic effects from reporting, timing, or other ‘artificial’ responses.

I am particularly interested in international issues in taxation such as the connecting factors used to determine who should be taxed in a particular jurisdiction (residency, citizenship, etc.), preferential regimes for high-income or high-wealth individuals arriving from abroad, and offshore evasion.

In ongoing projects, I study the migration responses of super-rich foreigners to tax hikes, the effects of enforcement efforts on tax avoidance scheme suppliers and users, and individual saving responses to mandatory pension saving policies.

Email:  david.burgherr@econ.uzh.ch

Ella Deeken is a third-year economics PhD student at the University of Chicago interested in public economics, applied macroeconomics, and the interactions between inequality, housing, and taxes. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors where she worked on numerous projects related to wealth inequality. She has been involved in a variety of research projects investigating racial discrimination in the mortgage market, the socioeconomic consequences of housing assistance, and the effects of evictions on poverty outcomes. Her previous experience includes research work at UChicago Urban Labs, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, and the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance.

She received her BA in Economics from the University of Chicago. In her free time, she enjoys pilates, hiking, attending shows, and (amateur) paleontology.

My ongoing research is focused on optimal homeownership subsidies, manufactured housing, and the impact of recent tax changes on inequality. In particular, through my work I aim to combine insights from public economics with heterogeneous agent macroeconomics models to simulate tax policies, particularly those related to homeownership, and investigate their impacts on wealth and income inequality. I have also begun studying hand-to-mouth households and their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences of regional competition for firms through tax incentives. 

My desire to study inequality is inspired by my youngest sister, who my family fostered and then adopted from the most underserved area of DC, giving me a firsthand understanding of the far-reaching impact of socioeconomic disparities. Economics has provided me with a framework to understand the causes and consequences of inequality, and I hope to use my work to inform policies that maximize growth and opportunity for all.

Email:  edeeken@uchicago.edu

My name is Magnus. I am a first year PhD student at the University of Copenhagen. I did my master’s degree at the University of Oxford in ‘Economics for Development’ a topic which rarely leaves my mind. During my PhD I have thus far had the pleasure of doing some applied policy work in Kenya which is a country I hold very dear. Additional less (more?) important information includes a love of pickled herring and, sunlight and chaos.

My research is centered within the field of development public finance. I am deeply interested in illuminating how we can create equitable and efficient tax systems under the unique constraints faced by developing economies. My main focus areas a personal income taxation and VAT under limited institutional capacity.

Additionally, I am very interested in labor economics. Specifically, on how differential human capital accumulation can assert inequality dynamically in ways that may not be immediately observable from a static perspective.

Email:  magnuseldrup@gmail.com

I am a first-year PhD student in Economics at Stanford University. My research interests span macro, labor, and public economics, and I anticipate a research agenda focused on various dimensions of economic inequality. I am a recipient of the ERP Fellowship by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Previously I was a pre-doc at the University of Chicago and a research assistant at the European Central Bank. I hold an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics and a BSc in Economics from the University of Mannheim.

I plan to investigate the role of income and wealth inequality and answer related policy questions. I am most excited about analyzing the distributional consequences of tax policy and macroeconomic shocks. As part of my research agenda, I want to lend approaches from the public, labor, and macro literatures.

For example, I would like to investigate the distributional effects of recent inflation shocks using a quasi-experimental design and, based on the empirical findings, develop policy tools that can effectively absorb the distributional consequences.

I am also interested in inequality in amenities in the context of the spatial literature. Specifically, I’d like to understand the drivers of spatial disparities in amenities, which policies can effectively reduce this dimension of inequality, and their welfare implications.

Email:  jonas.enders@stanford.edu

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the ifo Institute and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Before entering graduate school, I worked at the Polish Ministry of Finance in the Fiscal Analysis Division, developing a microsimulation model and evaluating policy proposals. I hold an MSc in Econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam and a BSc in Quantitative Methods in Economics from Warsaw School of Economics.

I am interested in understanding public policies—their implementation, public perception, and effects. I use tax, survey, and text data to explore these questions.

In ongoing work, I am investigating the preferential tax treatment of business owners. I examine how the differences in tax treatment between employees and the self-employed influence choices regarding self-employment and the extent to which this is driven by entrepreneurial activity versus income reclassification. Additionally, I am studying attitudes towards public and private debt. Specifically, we examine the linguistic connotation between debt and guilt in Germanic languages to explore whether this connotation causally affects attitudes towards debt and how it shapes the discourse about public debt.

Email:  justynaklejdysz@gmail.com

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is doctoral candidate at Harvard Kennedy School studying public policy and economics. She is a doctoral fellow for the National Science Foundation, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Center and the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality & Social Policy. Her research aims to identify and intervene on patterns of discrimination in workplace and academic settings.

In 2022, she published a critically acclaimed collection, The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System, which is the first trade publication to exclusively feature Black scholars and experts across economics, education, health, climate, criminal justice, and technology. In 2019, she co-founded the viral and award-winning digital campaign #BlackBirdersWeek. The year prior she also co-founded The Sadie Collective, the first non-profit organization to address the underrepresentation of Black women in economics, finance, and policy. To date, she remains the youngest recipient for a CEDAW Women's Rights Award by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination all forms of Discrimination Against Women— previously awarded to Vice President Kamala Harris and former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2023, she achieved the distinction of being chosen for the inaugural Forbes 30 under 30 cohort in Boston. Her writing and commentary is featured widely by media outlets such as TIME, Bloomberg, NPR, and The New York Times.

I study inequality in workplace settings by using experiments and large administrative data sets to examine how accountability measures can affect decision-making and outcomes for communities at the intersection of race, gender, and class. My research interests lie in understanding whether organizations respond to interventions and efforts that hold them accountable to equity, how they respond, and the impact of these responses.

Email:  info@annagifty.com

Born and raised in Mexico, I pursued a degree in Economics at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). My academic and professional journey in economics has been marked by a focus on Political Economy, Public Finance, and Health Economics working alongside Jonathan Gruber, Enrique Seira, and Saumitra Jha and Benjamin Olken.

Currently, I am a third-year Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I am deepening my understanding and research in Public Finance and Political Economy. My research interests are particularly centered on understanding the dynamics of inequality and its intersections with political economy and its posible solutions.

My research primarily focuses on exploring the intricate relationship between corruption and the deterioration of democratic values. I am particularly interested in how pervasive corruption can undermine trust in democratic institutions and affect pro-social behaviors among citizens. Alongside this, I am delving into the inequality literature to gain a deeper understanding of how disparities in wealth and opportunities influence perceptions and trust in democracy and pro-social behaviors.

Additionally, I am keen on examining the potential impacts of technological advancements, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), on inequality. My goal is to investigate whether AI can be leveraged to mitigate economic and social disparities or if it might exacerbate them.

Email:  jriverao@mit.edu

My name is Navodhya, and I originally hail from the tundra of St. Paul, Minnesota. I moved to Washington, D.C. for college before heading to Ann Arbor to start my PhD in Economics at the University of Michigan last fall. During the second year of the PhD, I plan to study Public Finance and Trade. 

It is difficult to live and learn in D.C. without gaining a love for public policy, history, and international affairs. After completing my undergraduate degree, I spent 3 years at the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department. My time at Treasury overlapped with the height of the pandemic, instilling in me a strong appreciation for the work of public finance economists and policymakers. In 2020, I worked on disbursing emergency aid to local governments. I witnessed the efforts made to reach the most under resourced areas of the United States. I consider my later role as part of the U.S. negotiation team to the OECD’s international tax agreements to be driven by the same underlying concerns on the need for long-term government funding to combat inequality. 

In my research, I am drawn to questions related to firm behavior and firm-worker interactions. My current research is on the tax motivated profit shifting of multinational companies. My recent work has examined how complex tax planning arrangements facilitate tax avoidance. In doing so, I document the outsized contribution of large U.S. companies to the erosion of the U.S. corporate tax base. Continuing this work, I am interested in understanding how any potential benefits of tax savings derived from profit shifting are distributed amongst workers within a firm. Along the same line of inquiry, in my future research, I hope to examine how the corporate tax incidence between labor and capital varies across firm and worker types.  

Finally, I am fascinated by the study of income inequality from a sociological perspective; how does inequality compare with concepts of equity and absolute versus relative income levels? Can inequality co-exist with very low rates of poverty? Why and when is inequality perceived as unjust? I think these questions are important to ponder as economists! 

Email:  navodhya@umich.edu

I am currently a PhD student in Economics at Harvard. I am originally from the Seattle area, and attended the University of Chicago for my undergraduate degree. Prior to graduate school, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at Opportunity Insights, where I worked on projects related to the determinants and causal effects of admission to elite universities. In my free time, I enjoy running, reading, and discovering new coffee shops.

My fields are labor and public economics, and I am primarily motivated by questions concerning economic and social inequality in the United States. One of my interests is the role of colleges in socioeconomic mobility amid recent trends in higher education and changes in the wage structure. Additionally, I am interested in the causes and consequences of the decline in marriage and shifting family structures in America. Relatedly, I also hope to study the phenomenon of “reverse gender gaps”, whereby lower and middle-class boys and men have fallen increasingly behind their female counterparts in education and the labor market.

Email:  claresuter@g.harvard.edu

Email:  junseoklee@berkeley.edu