My research interests span public finance, family economics, housing markets, and computational economics. I study topics such as taxation, inequality, family composition, and housing dynamics, primarily through the lens of quantitative macroeconomics. By incorporating rich heterogeneity into structural models, my work captures key complexities of real-world economies. This approach enables a detailed examination of how different groups respond to policy changes. The resulting quantitative evidence is directly applicable to the evaluation and design of real-world tax scheme, welfare system, and housing policies, with a particular focus on distributional impacts and welfare improvement.
Family Economics
"Accounting for the Changing in Household Composition", with Juan Carlos Conesa & Junshan Zhou, 2026. Ready to submit.
[Abstract] Welfare programs are heavily skewed toward low-income single-parent families with more children. In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium overlapping-generations model that endogenizes marriage and divorce decisions, fertility choices, education, and labor supply to quantify the role of welfare policy in shaping family composition. We find that, in the absence of welfare provision, marriage rates rise and divorce rates fall—particularly among young and low-skilled individuals, who rely more heavily on marriage as a form of economic insurance when public support is unavailable. Assortative mating intensifies along both education and wealth dimensions, as the removal of welfare strengthens incentives to match with partners of similar socioeconomic status, leading to more unions among high-skilled and wealthy individuals. Welfare removal also reduces fertility: low-skilled women, in particular, shift from exerting fertility effort in the benchmark economy to increasing contraception effort. Finally, the share of single mothers declines sharply—especially among young and low-skilled women—while those who continue to choose single motherhood in the absence of welfare are economically more stable.
"Optimal Gender Taxation", with Hans Holter & Serhiy Stepanchuk. Working in progress.
"Time Limit of Welfare Provision on Family Formation", with Juan Carlos Conesa & Junshan Zhou. Working in progress.
UK Housing Market
"Buy-to-Let and UK Housing Market", with Alessandro Mennuini & Serhiy Stepanchuk, 2026. Working paper.
[Abstract] The homeownership rate among young adults in the UK declined steadily from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, with the drop particularly pronounced in regions that experienced rapid growth in Buy-to-Let (BTL) investment. This paper develops an overlapping-generations model featuring both residential and rental housing markets to quantify the extent to which BTL expansion reshaped housing tenure outcomes for young cohorts and widened intergenerational disparities. Our results show that the BTL scheme encourages middle-income households to enter the rental investment market, exerting upward pressure on house prices and crowding out young adults seeking to step onto the housing ladder.
"Housing Affordabiltiy Crisis and Tax Reform". Working in progress.
Taxation and Redistribution
"A Quantitative Evaluation of Universal Basic Income", with Juan Carlos Conesa & Bo Li, 2023. Journal of Public Economics, vol. 223.
[Abstract] We provide a quantitative evaluation of the impact of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an alternative to the existing system of means-tested transfers. We explore varying levels of UBI generosity, paired with different strategies to finance it. All the reforms we consider result in welfare losses for a huge majority of initial households. Moreover, these losses are increasing in UBI generosity. A reform financed with consumption taxes implies lower efficiency losses than reforms financed with income taxes, but fewer individuals benefit from it.
"Welfare Implications of Switching to Consumption Taxation", with Juan Carlos Conesa & Bo Li, 2020. Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control, vol. 223.
[Abstract] We evaluate a reform of the US tax system switching to consumption taxation instead of income taxation. We do so in an environment that allows for progressivity of consumption taxes through differential tax rates between basic and non-basic consumption goods. The consumption tax system that maximizes aggregate welfare involves a 4% subsidy on basic consumption goods and a 68% tax on non-basic goods. Such a tax scheme generates 10% higher output in the long run, with a small increase in inequality. Nonetheless, the benchmark with progressive income taxes and mild consumption taxes provides higher welfare on aggregate in the steady state, and even more so if we consider the transition.
"Dynamic Effects of Consumption Tax Reforms with Durable Consumption", 2020. B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, vol. 20(2), pages 1-33, June.
[Abstract] This paper introduces durables into a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping generation model with idiosyncratic income shocks and endogenous borrowing constraints, which depend on durables. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare effects of consumption tax reforms in a richer model that captures the difference between nondurable and durable consumption. When durables are considered, the standard results that a shift to consumption taxes is welfare improving are overturned. The mechanism of this opposing result is that consumption tax makes durable consumption more expensive without relaxing the borrowing constraint. The inability of borrowing to insure against income risk deviates the economy further away from market completeness and particularly hurts young and poor households. As a result, welfare decreases, coupled with negative redistribution.
"Consumption Taxes and Precautionary Savings", with Alexis Anagnostopoulos, 2013. Economics Letters, vol. 119(3), pages 238-242.
[Abstract] Financing government spending through lump sum taxes does not distort capital when markets are complete but tends to increase precautionary savings under market incompleteness. Using flat consumption taxes instead leaves precautionary savings unaffected, provided certain conditions on utility are met.
Consumption and Household Finance
"The Implication of Subsistence Consumption for Economic Welfare", with Myungkyu Shim & Yongheng Wen, 2017. Economics Letters, vol. 158(C), pages 30-33.
[Abstract] Using a subsistence consumption-augmented real business cycle model, we show that, for any given exogenous growth rates or parameter values, high initial subsistence levels increase the welfare cost of business cycles. This happens because subsistence consumption increases consumption volatility. Our finding suggests that eliminating economic fluctuations can be more beneficial to less-developed economies in which subsistence consumption is a high fraction of aggregate consumption. However, fastgrowing economies exhibit a lower discrepancy of welfare costs between rich and poor countries, a result that also highlights the importance of growth-enhancing policies.
"On the consumption-saving decision and welfare consequences of increasing AQI", with Hanming Fang & Yapei Zhang, 2025. Working paper.
[Abstract] Air pollution has a large detrimental effect on human health. Pollution-induced health risk incentivizes households to adjust their life-cycle consumption-saving decision. Using the Chinese Household Finance Survey data, we provide causal evidence that households facing high air pollution consume less but increase the proportion of safe asset. They also invest more in health and exhibit higher demand for insurance. To quantify the welfare costs of air pollution-related health hazards, we employ a stochastic dynamic overlapping generation model with endogenous health accumulation in a partial equilibrium framework. Our numerical results indicate that air pollution-induced multidimensional health risks reduce consumption due to an income effect of declined labor productivity and a crowding-out effect of increased health investments. A permanent reduction in earnings capacity account for 37.9 percent of the welfare loss, followed by more persistent idiosyncratic health shocks, the less inefficient health production technology and higher health depreciation rates.