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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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.
Svetlozar Nestorov
Svetlozar Nestorov is an associate professor of information systems at Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business. His research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and web technologies. Nestorov received his undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics, his M.S. in computer science, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.
Elizabeth Davis
Elizabeth E. Davis is a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota. She specializes in the study of public policies relating to children, families, education, and the workforce, particularly in the context of limited resources or low incomes. Her recent research has focused on measuring disparities in access to high-quality child care and the role of child care subsidies in families’ decisions about employment and the type, quality, and stability of child care arrangements. Davis recently served as a member of two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees that produced the consensus study reports “Transforming the Financing Early Care and Education” in 2018 and “Vibrant and Healthy Kids: Aligning Science, Practice and Policy to Advance Health Equity” in 2019. For more than 20 years, she has advised state and federal agencies on child care subsidy policy. Davis earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from the University of Michigan and her B.A., summa cum laude, in economics and environmental studies from Bowdoin College.
Ivan Rudik
Ivan Rudik is an associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. His research focuses on the economics of climate change and the design of climate change and air pollution policies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and B.S. from Rochester Institute of Technology.