Michael Navarrete is the Alice Rivlin Dissertation Fellow at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy and a Ph.D. candidate in the Economics Department at the University of Maryland. He is an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he works on projects designed to modernize key economic statistics such as inflation using scanner-level data. He is also working on the RESET project, which is supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Navarrete’s research is on Unemployment Insurance benefits, with a focus on how administrative burdens at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a decline in consumption. He is also interested in income inequality, as well as how inflation rates vary geographically across the United States. He received a B.A. in economics and French from Williams College.
Expert Type: Grantee
Andres Drenik
Andres Drenik is an economist specializing in macroeconomics and international finance. He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, Drenik was an assistant professor at Columbia University, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and a visitor at Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. His research focuses on a range of topics, including pricing behavior in foreign currency in emerging economies, the impact of currency choice in domestic contracts on optimal monetary policy, and the redistributive effects of exchange rate policies. His recent research on macro-labor economics explores the dynamics of labor markets after nominal devaluations, the international price of remote work, and the effects of wage rigidities on labor market flows. Drenik earned his B.A. and M.A. in economics from Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina in 2006 and went on to complete his Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University in 2016.
Christian Moser
Christian Moser is an assistant professor within the Economics Division at Columbia University Business School and an affiliated faculty member within the Department of Economics at Columbia University. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics. Previously, Moser was a senior economist within the Research Division and a visiting scholar at the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a research associate at the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute at the University of Minnesota, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a daily visitor at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, and a visitor at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. Moser’s research revolves around topics in macroeconomics, labor economics, and public economics, with a focus on income inequality. He has taught related courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Moser received a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Princeton University.
Andres Blanco
Andres Blanco is a research economist and associate adviser on the macroeconomics team in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His major field of study is macroeconomics, with particular interests in monetary economics, labor markets, and methods for macroeconomic modeling. Blanco is also a visiting scholar in the Economics Department at Emory University. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed in 2023, he spent 7 years as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Michigan. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. He has published his research in several journals, including Econometrica, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Quantitative Economics. Blanco received his Ph.D. in economics in 2015 from New York University and his master's degree in economics in 2009 from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2007.
Zack Cooper
Zack Cooper is an associate professor of public health and of economics, and serves as director of health policy at the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Cooper is a health economist whose work is focused on producing data-driven scholarship that can inform public policy. In his academic work, he has analyzed the impact of competition in hospital and insurance markets, studied the influence of price transparency on consumer behavior, investigated the causes of surprise out-of-network bills, and examined the influence of electoral politics on healthcare spending growth. Cooper has published his research in leading economics and medical journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the New England Journal of Medicine. He has also presented his research at the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Zarek Brot-Goldberg
Zarek Brot-Goldberg is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, as well as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliate of the HMR Lab at Harvard University and Gilbert Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies antitrust and regulatory policy in U.S. healthcare. Some of his current research examines the anticompetitive effects of hospital mergers, the ramifications of prior authorization rules in Medicare Part D, and the differences in beneficiary composition and utilization between Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2019 and spent the 2019–2020 academic year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale University. His research has been published in top economics journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review. He won the 2018 National Institute for Health Care Management Research Award for his study on the inefficiency of high-deductible health insurance plans.
Aaron Sojourner
Aaron Sojourner is a labor economist and senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. His research focuses on the effects of labor-market institutions on economic productivity and society, policies to promote efficient and equitable development of human capital, and behavioral economic approaches to consumer financial decisions. He serves on the ILR Review international editorial board and received the John T. Dunlop Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. His research won the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences editorial board’s 2020 Cozzarelli Prize for Behavioral and Economic Sciences. Sojourner has a wide range of policy experience and community service. He is a member of the Minnesota State Advisory Council on Early Childhood Care and Education and chairs the Constellation Fund’s Impact Council. Previously, he spent the 2016–2017 academic year in Washington, DC, serving as a senior economist for labor at the Council of Economic Advisers, served on Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges’ Cradle-to-K cabinet, as a member of the Human Capital Research Collaborative’s steering committee, a director of Spring Bank (a community bank in the Bronx and Harlem in New York), and a fellow in the U.S. Senate’s Labor Policy Office. Sojourner completed his Ph.D. in economics at Northwestern University in 2009 and was a pre-doctoral fellow in the university’s Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences. He also has an M.A. in public policy analysis from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in history from Yale University. From 2009 to 2022, he worked as a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.
Gabrielle Pepin
Gabrielle Pepin is an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Her research interests include public economics, labor economics, and public policy. She is especially interested in topics related to tax-and-transfer programs, including child care subsidies, cash assistance, and Unemployment Insurance. In her research, Pepin studies effects of the Child and Dependent Care Credit on paid child care use and parents’ labor market outcomes, as well as implications of its design on caregiving and labor supply incentives. In other work, she estimates effects of time limits and interventions intended to increase application completion within the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Pepin is involved in evaluations of the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment program for Unemployment Insurance beneficiaries. Her work has been featured in Public Finance Review, Southern Economic Journal, and Journal of Behavioral Public Administration. She was awarded the 2022 Georgescu-Roegen Prize for best academic article published in Southern Economic Journal. Pepin holds a Ph.D. in economics from Michigan State University and a B.S. in mathematical economics from the University of St. Thomas.
David McMillon
David McMillon is an assistant professor of economics at Emory University, where he teaches a newly designed course, The Economics of Systemic Racism. The goal of his work is to use systems thinking to combat systemic discrimination. He draws on his training to explore how features of complex systems can be exploited to amplify the effects of racial equity-focused interventions, for the same reasons they amplify inequities in the status quo. This includes work on the academic achievement, the school-to-prison pipeline, reparations and wealth inequality, and formal models of systemic discrimination. McMillon is also affiliated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, and the Samuel Dubois Cook Center for Racial Equity. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Michigan in applied mathematics and in industrial and operations engineering, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences.
Karen Kopecky
Karen Kopecky is an economic and policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Her major field of study is macroeconomics with particular interests in inequality, public finance, insurance markets, retirement, health, family, and computational methods for macroeconomic modeling. Kopecky is a visiting scholar of the Economics Department at Emory University. She has been serving as an associate editor at Quantitative Economics since July 2022. Prior to joining the Cleveland Fed in 2023, she was an economist at the Atlanta Fed. She spent 4 years as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario. Kopecky received her Ph.D. in economics in 2007 and her master’s degree in economics in 2003, both from the University of Rochester. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and her Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001.