Taryn Morrissey is a professor of public policy in the School of Public Affairs, Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University. Her work focuses on examining and improving public policies for vulnerable children, including early care and education, nutrition assistance, and public health policies. Morrissey has served in senior policy positions at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and on the staff of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. She began her career in policy as a Society for Research in Child Development/American Association for the Advancement of Science Congressional Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Cornell University, her M.A. in human development and family studies at Cornell University, and her B.S. in psychology and child development at Tufts University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Adam Reich
Adam Reich is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate at Columbia’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics. His research focuses on three institutions that jointly structure the life chances and permeate the lives of millions of Americans today: the healthcare system, the criminal justice system, and the low-wage labor market. Reich is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018), co-authored with Peter Bearman. He is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, Socio-Economic Review, and Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Reich received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society scholar at Columbia University from 2012 to 2014.
Elena Patel
Elena Patel is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. Her research is focused on public finance, corporate tax policy, and gendered labor market outcomes. Prior to joining the University of Utah faculty, she worked extensively in the federal government, including the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Office of Accountability and Compliance at the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Macroeconomic Analysis Division at the Congressional Budget Office, and the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She received her B.S. in economics and mathematics in 2007, her M.A. in economics in 2008, and her Ph.D. in economics in 2013 from the University of Michigan.
Fatih Guvenen
Fatih Guvenen is the Curtis L. Carlson Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and the founding director of the Minnesota Economics Big Data Institute. He is also an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He has held visiting or full-time academic positions at the University of Rochester, New York University’s Stern School of Business, Yale University, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His research covers various dimensions of economic inequality and how these interact with the macroeconomy and government policies. Guvenen’s papers have been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies, among others, and have been covered in the media (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, and Fortune,among others). His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Retirement Research Consortium, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other organizations. Guvenen received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Turkey and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in economics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Jenna Stearns
Jenna Stearns is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. She is also a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of Labor and a Research Affiliate at the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis. Her research is currently focused on understanding the effects of social insurance and family-friendly policies on labor market choices, productivity, family structure, and health outcomes. Stearns received her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her B.A. in economics from Whitman College.
Nirupama Rao
Nirupama Rao is an assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her research concerns the economic effects of fiscal policy, focusing on the impact of policy on firm production, investment, and pricing decisions. She is a recipient of the National Tax Association Dissertation Award. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She served as a senior economist from 2015–2016 at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, D.C. Rao holds a Ph.D. and a B.S. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Christian Wolf
Christian Wolf is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Princeton University. His research interests lie at the intersection of macroeconomics, econometrics, and finance. In ongoing work, he shows how to estimate the "missing general equilibrium intercept" of microlevel diff-in-diff regressions for macro policy questions, with applications to the aggregate effects of consumption and investment tax stimulus. In other projects he has revisited the classical question of monetary policy transmission, studied the aggregation properties of macroeconomic models with rich firm heterogeneity (with Yann Koby), and proved the generic equivalence of two popular econometric techniques—Local Projections and Structural Vector Autoregressions (with Mikkel Plagborg-Møller). Prior to joining the Ph.D. program at Princeton University, he received a B.A. in economics from the University of Cambridge.
Hazhir Rahmandad
Hazhir Rahmandad is the Schussel Family professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. His research draws on fieldwork, quantitative models, and experimental data to understand the adoption of different strategies among firms. His research has shown how significantly different strategies in terms of employee’s experience could co-exist in mass market services and has elaborated on challenges to adoption of “good jobs” strategies in this sector. Rahmandad’s research also spans methodological and public health contributions, has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, and has appeared in diverse journals, including Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, American Journal of Public Health, and Obesity Reviews, among others.
Jacob Orchard
Jacob Orchard is a Ph.D. student in economics at the University of California, San Diego, with interests in empirical macroeconomics and monetary policy. Prior to graduate school, he double majored in mathematics and economics at Brigham Young University and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His current research focuses on inflation dispersion—the idea that individuals have different inflation rates because of different preferences and ability to substitute—and the consequences of inflation dispersion for macroeconomic policy.
Jennifer Romich
Jennie Romich is a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington and faculty director of the West Coast Poverty Center. She studies resources and economic well-being in families with an emphasis on low-income workers, household budgets, and families’ interactions with public policy. Her recent projects include research into effective marginal tax rates created by means-tested benefit schedules and the tax system; an investigation of income of families involved with the child welfare system; and mixed-method evaluations of the Seattle Paid Safe and Sick Time Ordinance and $15 minimum wage. She co-leads the national effort on “Ending Economic Inequality” for the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare’s Grand Challenges Initiative and co-chairs a national research network on poverty, employment, and self-sufficiency through the Consortium of U.S. Poverty Centers.