The annual growth rate of the US economy has declined since the post-World War II era. While many policy makers express a high-level goal of encouraging economic growth as a macroeconomic objective, policy discussions of economic growth and "pro-growth" policy changes are frequently discussed in terms that are aspirational rather than evidence-based. My teaching, research, student advising, and policy engagement are all centered on trying to improve our (society's) understanding of the expected effects of different types of policy changes on innovation, productivity, and economic growth.
My undergraduate course at Dartmouth -- ECON 48: Microeconomic policies and economic growth, co-taught with Josh Lewis from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business -- centers on discussing a series of nine specific policy levers with a goal of helping students understand the ways in which research can inform our understanding of the expected effects of such policy changes on the US economy:
Changes to federal permitting requirements
Changes to federally funded R&D investments
Changes to housing regulation
Changes to human capital investments
Changes to immigration of high-skilled workers
Changes to policies related to artificial intelligence
Changes to regulation
Changes to tax policy for business investment
Changes to transmission infrastructure
My current research, student advising, and policy engagement are centered on these same topics.
The structure of my undergraduate course parallels a research effort I am co-leading with Pete Klenow from Stanford and Ken Kuttner from Williams College at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), on microeconomic policies and macroeconomic growth. I am very grateful to the Smith Richardson Foundation for financial support of that project.
Together with Ben Jones from Northwestern, I co-direct the NBER's Innovation Policy working group which includes regularly co-organizing a NBER Summer Institute meeting on innovation and productivity. I am very grateful to the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving for financial support of that meeting.
I serve on the advisory board for an NBER initiative on the social return to R&D investment co-run by Craig Garthwaite (Northwestern) and Tim Simcoe (Boston University). I am very grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving for financial support of that initiative.
I work part-time on contract as a research adviser with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), supporting CBO's work for the Congress on a broad range of budgetary and economic issues including many of the topics covered in my undergraduate course.
An example is permitting requirements for investments in physical infrastructure as described in this piece with Joe Kile and Sam Papenfuss from CBO (for more on CBO's permitting work, see also these slides and this code). More generally, this paper provides a discussion of CBO's methods for analyzing the economic effects of a wide range of provisions included in the 2025 reconciliation act.
Jeff Kling (CBO's Research Director) and I have presented on the role of research in CBO's work for the Congress, highlighting opportunities for research and other ways for researchers to contribute to CBO's work, at the 2026 ASSA meetings and in January 2026 at a conference at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago.
In addition to my part-time work with CBO, I collaborate with various DC-based think tanks including the Institute for Progress (co-led by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney) and the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy (led by David Wessel) at Brookings.
I am very grateful to the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and several individual donors for providing financial support for my research.
In addition to my undergraduate course at Dartmouth, I also contribute to several broader teaching and field-building efforts related to innovation, productivity, and economic growth:
For several years, I have co-organized a one-week summer “camp” for PhD students on the economics of innovation, hosted by the NBER and co-organized with Kevin Bryan from Toronto, Ina Ganguli from U-Mass Amherst, Ben Jones from Northwestern, and Kyle Myers from HBS. Slides for the summer 2022, summer 2023, summer 2024, and summer 2025 lectures are available online. I am very grateful to the Abundance and Growth Fund at Coefficient Giving for financial support of that summer program.
Twice over the past several years, I have co-taught in a (free) online short course for PhD students on the economics of ideas, science, and innovation, co-taught with Pierre Azoulay from MIT, Kevin Bryan from Toronto, Matt Clancy from Coefficient Giving, Michael Clemens from Johns Hopkins University, Janet Freilich from Boston University, Ina Ganguli from U-Mass Amherst, Michi Igami from Toronto, Ben Jones from Northwestern, Chad Jones from Stanford, Kyle Myers from HBS, and John Van Reenen from the LSE. I am very grateful to the Institute for Progress for hosting this course.
Together with Kevin Bryan from Toronto, I co-wrote a chapter for the 2021 Handbook of Industrial Organization on innovation policy. As a companion effort to that chapter, Kevin and I created an open-access set of lecture slides aimed at reducing the cost of others teaching this material. We designed these lecture slides to be modular, so that individual lectures could be used in a stand-alone fashion as part of a field course (e.g. a lecture on immigration and innovation that could be used as part of a labor economics course), but the lecture slides also fit together into a coherent framework for any faculty like myself who may want to use them for a full course on the economics of innovation. Kevin and I taught an early version of this material in a 2021 Continuing Education course at the American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, and I taught this material in a Stanford PhD course (Economics 244: Market Failures and Public Policy).