Bio: Richard W. Evans, PhD
Richard Evans is Senior Economist at the Abundance Institute in Salt Lake City. He also holds appointments as Director of the Open Source Economics Laboratory, and President of Open Research Group, Inc., and is on the advisory boards of QuantEcon.org, the Applied and Computational Math Emphasis (ACME) at Brigham Young University, and the Policy Simulation Library group. Evans specializes in macroeconomics, public economics, and computational economics. He is currently leading the FiscalSim-US project to build an open source 50-state microsimulation model of federal and state individual tax and benefit policy as well as open access data to support the model. Evans is also a co-maintainer of the OG-USA open source macroeconomic model of US fiscal policy.
Evans has held previous positions at the University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute, Tax Policy Center, Center for Growth and Opportunity, Rice University, and Brigham Young University. He has founded, funded, and directed two major open-source and open-access student mentoring computational economics research and training programs—Open Source Economics Laboratory, University of Chicago 2017-2020 and BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory, Brigham Young University 2012-2016. Evans has also spent time as a researcher at the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Utah Economic Council, and as an economic consultant.
Evans’ research focuses on the macroeconomic effects of taxes and spending on government deficits and debt, building large-scale, open-source, dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic models of tax policy, and providing web applications and training to allow non-experts to use these models for policy analysis. Evans is a core maintainer of the open source OG-Core large-scale overlapping generations macroeconomic model fiscal policy and its country-specific calibrations and of the open source FiscalSim-US microsimulation model of US federal and state individual tax and benefit policy. Evans has provided macroeconomic modeling consulting services to the United Nations, World Bank, European Commission, and Indian Ministry of Finance.
Evans holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin (2008, 2005), an M.A. in public policy from Brigham Young University (2003), and a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University (1998).