Visiting Scholars Program

Petter Berg is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. He works primarily with topics related to education, labor and development economics, with a particular focus on education markets. Currently, he is working on the efficiency and equity of charter high school markets in Sweden. He is sponsored by Christopher Walters and will be visiting IRLE from October 2024 to March 2025.

Davi Bhering is a PhD student at the Paris School of Economics. His research focuses on tax policy in developing countries, especially on firms. He is currently working on the design of differentiated indirect tax rates and the interconnection between the offshore behavior of firms and their owners.

Ana Bottega is a PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of São Paulo (USP). In 2023, she was a visiting student at the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University and later at the Center of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of public finance, development economics, and labor economics. Her ongoing projects focus on personal and corporate income tax reforms, investigating how they shape firm behavior, trade flows, and inequalities.

In 2024, Ana began serving as an advisor to the international taxation agenda of the G20 Presidency at the Federal Ministry of Finance in Brazil. In this role, she is primarily responsible for negotiating the coordination of effective global taxation on the super-rich.

She will be visiting UC Berkeley during the 2024/2025 academic year.

Federica is an Assistant Professor at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the Institute of Economics and Econometrics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in September 2023. Her research on Political Economy focuses on contract enforcement institutions, organized crime, and its persistence. Her work on Labour Economics concentrates on the effect of choosing a college major on labour market outcomes. Federica will be at IRLE in from end of January 2025 to end of February 2025.

Luiz Cantarelli is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of São Paulo. His main research interests are fiscal policy, inequality, and tax policy. His recent research investigates the impacts of Covid-19 on fiscal policy and progressive taxation. He is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will be at IRLE from May 2024 to December March 2025.

Elin Colmsjö is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen and an affiliated doctoral student at the Danish Central Bank. Her research interests lie in household finance and inequality. She currently uses administrative data to investigate the impact of early intergenerational wealth transfers on lifelong housing wealth accumulation and business ownership among recipients. Elin is sponsored by Hillary Hoynes and will be a visiting researcher at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) from September 2024 to March 2025.

Alice Chiocchetti is a PhD student at the Paris School of Economics working in the field of international public finance. Her research revolves around the study of profit shifting of multinational firms and the challenges linked to the taxation of extractive firms for resource-rich countries. She is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez for the fall semester.

Elie Gerschel is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests lie in environmental, labor and macroeconomics, with an emphasis on the redistributive aspects of the green transition. He studies how labor market trajectories are affected by energy consumption and prices using administrative data from France. Additionally, his work explores the impact of international trade in durable goods on pollution patterns across income levels and countries.

Rachel is a Ph.D. Candidate in Food and Nutrition Policy and Programs at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Rachel’s research focuses on diet quality in low-income settings, particularly valuing household labor and its effect on food consumption and health. She will be at the IRLE from August 2024 to August 2025.

Giuseppe Grasso is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). His main research interests lie in the fields of applied microeconometrics and labor economics. His recent work has focused on how skill demand responds to policy interventions and influences wage inequality. He is currently researching topics related to migration, firm policies, and labor market outcomes. Giuseppe holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Luxembourg and LISER (2023). He is sponsored by David Card and will be at the IRLE from September 2024 to August 2025.

Philipp Heil is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Munich (LMU) and a junior economist at the ifo Institute. His research interests are in Macroeconomic and Public Finance, with particular interest in how economic agents react to various kinds of information. One of his current research projects investigates the demand of households for economic narratives and how these translate into changed beliefs and behavior. Another project studies the investment response of firms to information about the relative attractiveness of their location in a firm experiment. He is sponsored by Yuriy Gorodnichenko and will be at IRLE from January 2025 to April 2025.

Justyna is a PhD student at LMU Munich and a junior economist at the ifo Institute. Her research interests lie in public economics, with a focus on taxation, social transfers, and attitudes toward public policies. She is also interested in the applications of natural language processing in economic research. In her ongoing work, she examines the preferential tax treatment of business owners, attitudes toward public and private debt, and the design of subsidies in the care market. She is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and is visiting IRLE in Spring 2025.

Johannes Kochems is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Cologne, Germany. He is broadly interested in public economics, labor economics, and regional economics. In a current project, he investigates the fiscal effect of corporate profit shifting to local tax havens in Germany. He is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will be at the IRLE from January 2025 to May 2025.

Paul Lapinski is a 4th year PhD student in Economics at American University. He is interested in
public and labor economics with a focus on immigrant participation in the U.S. safety net. His
current work evaluates the labor and poverty effects of immigrants becoming tax credit eligible
and analyzes the effect of access to representation on outcomes for cases determining
immigrants’ legal status.

Qquillaccori García López is a third-year PhD candidate at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). She is affiliated with FAIR – CELE (the Centre for Empirical Labor Economics). She is broadly interested in labor and public economics, with a focus on social insurance and inequality. Her current research projects use Norwegian administrative data to study the impact of firm incentives in early retirement decisions and the impact of pension accrual for unpaid care work in households’ behavior after retirement. She is also working on a project about social security reform and formalization in the Spanish domestic services’ sector. She is sponsored by Hilary Hoynes and will be at the IRLE from September 2024 to May 2025.

Romaine Loubes is a PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics visiting UC Berkeley under the supervision of Pr. Mathilde Muñoz. She works on trade shocks and self-employment, specifically how the prevalence of self-employment in developing countries affect the incidence of trade policy, and how unpaid spousal labor within family businesses impacts trade shock vulnerability and resilience. Another part of her work examines the effects of trade shocks on domestic outsourcing in developed countries.
Romaine is also a coordinator for East and Southern Africa at the World Inequality Lab.

Bluebery is a Ph.D. candidate at the Paris School of Economics and École Normale Supérieure. His research focuses on public finance, taxation, and wealth inequality, with a particular interest in how government policies influence economic mobility and shape wealth distribution. His current projects examine the economic effects of inheritance and wealth taxation, the efficiency of public spending, and the political economy of carbon pricing. Bluebery employs administrative data and quasi-experimental methods to provide new insights into tax design and enforcement, with ongoing work exploring offshore real estate investments and international tax evasion. His research aims to inform equitable and effective economic policies in the face of globalization and rising inequality.

Johanna Roth is a PhD candidate at Sciences Po Paris, specializing in labor economics with a focus on job search and unemployment. Her current research examines the role of soft skills in shaping the trajectories of unemployed individuals, as well as the impact of housing instability and homelessness on job search behavior and employment outcomes. Johanna is sponsored by Hilary Hoynes and will be at the IRLE from February 2025 to May 2025.

Sofia is a PhD candidate in Economics at HEC Lausanne. Her research focuses on labor economics, public economics, and international trade. In previous work, she examined the impact of school closures on parental labor supply. Currently, she is investigating how the economic shock of the pandemic has affected occupational employment trajectories. Additionally, using Swiss administrative data, she is analyzing the effects of corporate taxation on export behavior. She is sponsored by Patrick Kline and will be at the IRLE from January to June 2025.

Théo Valentin is a 3rd year PhD student at CREST (Institut Polytechnique de Paris). He is interested in Public Economics with a focus on taxation. He is currently working on the efficiency of scale-based policies targeting subsets of firms and their partial and general equilibrium effects.

Dominik Wehr is a PhD student at the Stockholm School of Economics, specializing in labor economics and macroeconomics. His research explores the determinants of labor mobility and the role of search frictions in labor market competition, as well as the economic consequences of workplace stress. Dominik is sponsored by Benjamin Schoefer and will be a visiting scholar at IRLE from February to June 2025.

Martin Wiegand is a PhD candidate at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. His research focuses on labor economics and urban economics, with a particular interest in how public policies influence workers’ location choices. In his current project, Martin investigates how the design of unemployment benefits impacts the location decisions of jobseekers. He is sponsored by Enrico Moretti and will be visiting the IRLE from January to May 2025.

Xi Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Texas. She was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Lusk Center for Real Estate, University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests lie in Labor Economics and Urban Economics, with a focus on urban, housing, and welfare policies and their broad economic impacts such as fertility and marriage, individual labor market outcomes, household financial well-being, and local economic growth.

Véra Zabrodina is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on labor economics, health economics and public finance. Véra’s research examines the functioning of insurance markets and transfer systems. In particular, she develops theoretical models and empirical tests to uncover sources of asymmetric information and their implications for the design of health and unemployment insurance. Véra earned her PhD in economics from the University of Basel, and her fellowship is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Davi Bhering is a PhD student at the Paris School of Economics. His research focuses on tax policy in developing countries, especially on firms. He is currently working on the design of differentiated indirect tax rates and the interconnection between the offshore behavior of firms and their owners.

Elin Colmsjö is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen and an affiliated doctoral student at the Danish Central Bank. Her research interests lie in household finance and inequality. She currently uses administrative data to investigate the impact of early intergenerational wealth transfers on lifelong housing wealth accumulation and business ownership among recipients. Elin is sponsored by Hillary Hoynes and will be a visiting researcher at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) from September 2024 to March 2025.

Maddalena Conte is a 3rd year PhD candidate at CREST (Institut Polytechnique de Paris), under the supervision of Benoit Schmutz (CREST) and Isabelle Mejean (Sciences Po). She is interested in economic geography, labor, migration and urban economics. Maddalena studies spatial inequalities in opportunities and the role of information frictions for mobility. Maddalena is visiting the Center for Labor Economics at the University of California Berkeley, hosted by Prof. Enrico Moretti, from March 2024 to May 2024.

Marcos Demetry is a PhD student at Linnaeus University in Sweden. He is also an affiliated doctoral student at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. His main interests lie in urban economics and segregation studies—more broadly, microeconometrics and policy evaluations. He is sponsored by Enrico Moretti and will be at IRLE (in Berkeley) from August to December 2023.

Giuseppe is a PhD candidate in Economics at Università della Svizzera italiana. He holds a Master in Economics and Economic Policy from the University of Bologna and successfully completed the Swiss Program for Beginning Doctoral Students in Economics hosted by the Swiss National Bank. He is currently visiting the department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include Labor economics, automation, and tourism economics.

Gerard Domènech-Arumí is a Postdoctoral Fellow at ECARES (Université Libre de Bruxelles). His work lies at the intersection of Public, Labor, and Urban Economics. His primary research agenda focuses on understanding the causal impacts of neighborhoods on outcomes such as perceptions, racial attitudes, and crime. He is also interested in the study of housing inequality and the evaluation of public policies. Gerard holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University (2021). He is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will be at IRLE from September to December 2023.

Malthe Jensen is a 3rd year PhD student at Aarhus University, Denmark. With an interest in labor and public economics, his work predominantly addresses issues related to inequality. Currently he studies the labor market effects of reducing commuting costs through tax incentives, and the dynamics of labor market sorting.

Agustín is a PhD candidate in economics at the LMU Munich in Germany. His research interests lie in the intersection of political economy and organizational economics (of the state), overlapping with topics related to personnel economics.

Jessica Fuchs is a graduate student at the University of Cologne. She is interested in Public and Labor Economics and will be conducting her Master’s thesis at IRLE from February to May 2024. Her current work investigates parameters in pension systems on labor supply and retirement choices.

Alexander Busch is a graduate student at Bonn University and a research associate at IZA with a background in Economics and Sociology. He is interested in industrial relations and education. Some of his current work explores the labour market consequences of a compressed education, the impact of teacher shortages on student outcomes, and the “strike dividend” for both workers and firms. He is sponsored by Benjamin Schoefer and will be at the IRLE from September 2023 to December 2023.

Antoine Germain is a PhD candidate at FNRS and UCLouvain, Belgium. His research focuses on public and welfare economics. He is interested in normative issues related to redistributive policies in labour markets. His current projects include a social welfare evaluation of basic income as well as the optimal regulation of leisure. He is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez will be visiting IRLE during Fall 2023.

Rachel is a Ph.D. Candidate in Food and Nutrition Policy and Programs at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Rachel’s research focuses on diet quality in low-income settings, particularly valuing household labor and its effect on food consumption and health. She will be at the IRLE from August 2024 to August 2025.

Matías Gutiérrez Quintana is a Master’s student in Economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He is broadly interested in studies on migration, crime and industrial organization. Previous works have focused on the willingness to pay for crime reduction in Latin American countries and the United States and also on how a change in law in Chile affects the labor formality of migrants and how the academic performance of young people changes when they are exposed to the migrant phenomenon. Currently, his work focuses on understanding the consequences of migrant exoduses in Latin America. Gutiérrez is visiting with a scholarship and sponsorship from the Nucleo Milenio Migra. He will be at IRLE from April 2024 to May 2024.

Paul Lapinski is a 4th year PhD student in Economics at American University. He is interested in public and labor economics with a focus on immigrant participation in the U.S. safety net. His current work evaluates the labor and poverty effects of immigrants becoming tax credit eligible and analyzes the effect of access to representation on outcomes for cases determining immigrants’ legal status.

Marcel Caesmann is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests lie in political economy, economic history, and cultural economics. Currently, he is working on the long-run formation of religious identities and their effect on economic behavior, including occupational choice and human capital investments. He further studies the impact of political protests on polarization and the effectiveness of censorship in curbing the spread of propaganda.

Elina Jussila is a PhD student at Tampere University and a researcher at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research (FIT). Her research interests primarily lie in public, health, and labor economics, and she is currently working on three separate projects. The first project examines the determinants of physicians’ prescription behavior, with a specific focus on the differences between the public and private sectors. The second paper analyzes how various unexpected shocks coinciding with important events determining a young person’s future – such as parent’s early death or job loss during Finnish high school matriculation exams – affect individual-level outcomes in adulthood. The final project studies how the replacement rate of sickness allowance impacts sickness absences.

Mustafa Kaba is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. He received his PhD in Economics from the European University Institute. His research interests are in political economy and behavioral economics. More specifically, he focuses on understanding how beliefs, incentives, and institutional structures shape economic behavior and outcomes in policy-relevant settings using applied microeconometrics, field experiments, and large-scale representative survey experiments. He also works as a consultant for the World Bank and occasionally teaches econometrics at the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences.

Anna Matzner is a PhD candidate in economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her research interests are in international economics and macroeconomics. In her current research projects, she focuses on the implications of climate policies and the energy transition for the macroeconomy and emphasizes the role of household and firm heterogeneity in the transmission process.

Ingrid Mikkelsen Semb is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics, University of Oslo. Her main research interests are within labor economics and economics of education. In her current work, she uses administrative data to study how college applications respond to affirmative action, as well as how affirmative action policies affect targeted and non-targeted groups. She is sponsored by Christopher Walters and will be at the IRLE from October 2023 to June 2024.

Matías Muñoz is a PhD Candidate at the University of Zurich. His research interests are in health and public economics, with a focus in insurance and developing countries. Currently, he is working on the trade-offs of public/private insurance provision, the effectiveness of primary care delivery, and the consequences of using markets to provide social insurance.

Damian Osterwalder is a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. His research interests are in labor and public economic, with a focus on social insurance and job matching. Currently, he is working on the optimality of unemployment insurance systems in the presence of repeated unemployment, the business cycle dynamics of vacancies, and the long-run impact of short-time work programs using large-scale administrative data. His work on vacancy durations and entry wages was recently published in the Review of Economic Studies. Damian is sponsored by Benjamin Schoefer and will be at IRLE from September 2023 to April 2024.

Gabriele Patete is a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. His research interests are in macroeconomics and public economics. At the moment, he is studying new ways to improve the effectiveness of public intervention in dealing with economic inequality and firms’ market power. He is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will be at IRLE from September 2023 to March 2024.

Lucas Ronconi is a Professor of Economics at the University of Buenos Aires and Researcher at CONICET in Argentina. He is IZA and PEP non-resident research fellow; and has published in the areas of development, labor markets and political economy, particularly on enforcement of labor regulations in less developed countries.

Luiz Cantarelli is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of São Paulo. His main research interests are fiscal policy, inequality, and tax policy. His recent research investigates the impacts of Covid-19 on fiscal policy and progressive taxation. He is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will be at IRLE from May 2024 to March 2025.

Florian Schoner is a third-year PhD student at the University of Munich (LMU) and a junior economist at the ifo Institute. In his research on education and labor economics, he focuses on determinants and consequences of individuals’ skill formation. In one of his projects, he estimates the effect of grading student behavior in the classroom on students’ academic achievement, non-cognitive skills, and school-to-work transition. In another project, he and a team of co-authors exploit resumé data to investigate how skill sets differ across demographic groups and the implications of these differences for individuals’ labor market outcomes. Finally, he studies workers’ beliefs about the labor market returns to firm training in light of technological change.

Erkka Silvennoinen is a third-year PhD student in Economics at Tampere University and part of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research group. His primary research interests lie in the field of applied microeconometrics and public economics, with a specific focus on the evaluation of tax and subsidy policies. Currently, his research covers the analysis of a first-time homebuyer’s (real estate) transfer tax exemption and the impact of local property taxes on firm behavior. His visit at UC Berkeley is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and he will be at IRLE from August 2023 to May 2024.

 Théo Valentin is a 2nd year PhD student at CREST (Institut Polytechnique de Paris). He is interested in Public Economics with a focus on taxation. He is currently working on the efficiency of scale-based policies targeting subsets of firms and their partial and general equilibrium effects.

Linda Wu is a PhD candidate at University College London and a PhD scholar at the Stone Center at UCL. Her fields of interest are public finance and labor economics. She uses administrative data to study questions related to wealth transfers and inequality. Her ongoing projects investigate behavioral responses to estate taxation and capital taxation, as well as resource misallocation and nepotism in family businesses.

Xi Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Texas. She was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Lusk Center for Real Estate, University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests lie in Labor Economics and Urban Economics, with a focus on urban, housing, and welfare policies and their broad economic impacts such as fertility and marriage, individual labor market outcomes, household financial well-being, and local economic growth.

Lukas Delgado-Prieto is a Ph.D. candidate at UC3M in Madrid. He is broadly interested in applied microeconomics and labor economics, with a focus on questions related to migration, minimum wages, and monopsony.  His recent work has focused on the differential impacts of the Venezuelan immigration in the informal and formal labor markets of Colombia, and on the role that firms play in determining the impact of immigration on native workers. He is sponsored by David Card and will be at the IRLE from September 2022 to December 2022.

Amory Gethin is a third-year PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics and a research fellow at the World Inequality Lab. His research focuses on the study of economic inequality and political conflict from a comparative and historical perspective. He co-created the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database (http://wpid.world), with Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty, which provides internationally comparable data on political divides around the world. Their book Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities (Harvard University Press, 2022) explores the conditions under which conflicts over inequality have become politically represented in 50 contemporary democracies. In his current work, he investigates the role that public goods have played in reducing global poverty in the past decades.

Jan Gromadzki is a PhD student at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and a researcher at the Institute for Structural Research in Warsaw (IBS). His interests lie in labor economics, political economy, and economic history. He is currently studying the effects of unconditional cash transfers on labor supply and poverty, political consequences of wealth inequality, and the role of peer effects in LGBTQ coming out decisions. He is sponsored by Gabriel Zucman and will be at the IRLE from August to December 2022.o May 2022.

Sebastian Hager is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Munich (LMU). In his research on labor economics and political economy, he focus on three fields. First, he does research in the economics of discrimination, and in labour economics more widely. In one of his projects, for example, he estimates the effects of superiors’ gender attitudes on women’s career outcomes. Second, he studies both the origins and the consequences of national identity. In the specific setting of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, he investigates how interethnic experiences changed people’s identity and behavior. Third, he is interested in how attitudes, social norms, and political narratives spread.

Christian Philip Hoeck is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen and a PhD Resident Fellow at Danmarks Nationalbank. His research focuses are macro and labor economics. He is currently studying how labor market tightness affects wages using detailed vacancy data and the sources of employer wage-setting power using matched survey and administrative data.  He is sponsored by Benjamin Schoefer and will be at IRLE from January 2023 to May 2023.

Salla Kalin is a 4th year PhD student at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki Graduate School of Economics. She is also part of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research group. She is working on three separate projects during her stay at IRLE. The first project looks into taxation driven migration decisions: do Finns move away because of high taxes in Finland? The second project concerns the labor supply of university students. This project also analyzes the impact of combining working and studying to academic performance of students. The third project analyzes the introduction of a disregard that allowed people on unemployment benefits to accept short-term working periods without them affecting their unemployment benefits. The question is, how does this affect the labor supply. All three projects utilize high quality Finnish admin data.

Alice Lapeyre is a PhD candidate in Economics at CREST/ENSAE. Her work is at the intersection between public and labor economics. She uses large survey and exhaustive administrative data to study how firms adjust their labor demand to shocks and to study short-time work policies. Alice is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will stay at IRLE for the Fall 2022 semester.

Ségal Le Guern Herry is a PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po and a Fulbright visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. His research – conducted under the supervision of Gabriel Zucman and Jean Marc Robin – investigates issues related to public economics, economics of taxation and applied microeconomics. He is particularly interested in tax evasion and its implications for tax progressivity and inequality.

Lukas Lehner is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, where his research focuses on labour market policies. He conducts large-scale field experiments on active labor market policies including the Marienthal job guarantee pilot scheme. He also studies wage dynamics, and has founded the Oxford Supertracker: The Global Directory of COVID Policy Trackers and Surveys.

His research has been featured by the Financial Times, CNN, Forbes and Nature in print and by ARTE, ZDF and ORF on TV. He has been awarded the Barnett Prize for the best paper at DSPI, University of Oxford, a Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy Grant and the UC Berkeley Fellowship of the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked as an economist at the OECD and the International Labour Organization.

Giulia La Mattina is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of South Florida and a Research Fellow at IZA. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Economics from Bocconi University. Her research interests are in labor and public economics, with a focus on the economics of the family and gender. Her current work explores factors that contribute to gender-based violence in both low-income and high-income settings. 

Kevin Parra Ramirez is a third-year PhD candidate at Sciences-Po Paris and a research economist at the French central bank. His research focuses on the study of tax evasion and avoidance, with a particular emphasis on the role of banks as both intermediaries and actors in those practices. He also works on the effects of international reforms aimed at tackling tax evasion. He was previously a Scientific Advisor at the French Council of Economic analysis – an independent advisory body to the French Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance – on the subjects of taxation and international dependencies.

Eléonore is a 3rd year PhD student at Paris School of Economics and EHESS. Her research focuses on the measurement of poverty in developed countries. Her first working paper, “Who Feels Poor? Transitions into Poverty and Subjective Well-Being”, shows evidence of a meaningful monetary poverty threshold at 80% of the median income, which is consistent with individuals’ well-being. More generally, she is interested in the determinants of poverty and extreme disadvantage, and the policy tools to fight against these phenomena.

David Phillips is a Research Professor in the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) and the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on poverty, particularly as it relates to low-wage labor markets, crime, and housing. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, David received a Bachelor’s degree from Butler University, earned a PhD in Economics from Georgetown University, and worked at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

Jon Piqueras is a PhD candidate at University College London, and a PhD Scholar at the Stone Centre at UCL. His research interests are in labor and public economics. In his main work, he studies social insurance programs in good and bad times, paying special attention to the evolution of their insurance and redistribution value over the business cycle. Recent work also focuses on the effects of minimum wages.

Paul Schüle is a PhD candidate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a junior Economist at the ifo Institute. His research focuses on topics in public economics and the measurement of equality of opportunity.

Daniel Weishaar is a PhD student at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich (LMU). His research interests span from public economics and welfare economics to political economy and normative economics. With his research, he wants to contribute to the understanding of i) the measurement of different types of inequality, ii) the perceptions of these inequalities by citizens of different societies, iii) the optimal design of public policies that take the complex nature of inequalities into account, and iv) the broader consequences of such inequalities for societies. For this purpose, he combines theoretical insights from optimal tax models with empirical analyses that are based on existing (administrative) data and specially developed survey experiments. In Fall 2022, Daniel Weishaar was a visiting scholar at Columbia University and he is visiting University of California, Berkeley in Spring 2023.

Lukas Delgado-Prieto is a Ph.D. candidate at UC3M in Madrid. He is broadly interested in applied microeconomics and labor economics, with a focus on questions related to migration, minimum wages, and monopsony.  His recent work has focused on the differential impacts of the Venezuelan immigration in the informal and formal labor markets of Colombia, and on the role that firms play in determining the impact of immigration on native workers. He is sponsored by David Card and will be at the IRLE from September 2022 to December 2022.

Pauline Carry is a PhD candidate in economics at CREST (ENSAE – Ecole Polytechnique). Her research focuses on labor economics. She is interested in the effects of labor market institutions and regulations affecting work relationships.

Sébastien Laffitte is a Fulbright Doctoral Scholar and PhD student at the ENS Paris-Saclay. His work is at the crossroads of international economics and public finance. He is currently working on tax havens, tax avoidance and tax evasion. He is sponsored by Gabriel Zucman and will stay at IRLE from September 2021 to May 2022.

Claire LeRoy is a PhD student at CREST, Ecole Polytechnique. Her research focuses on public economics. She is currently studying the issue of non take-up to social benefits from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective. She is sponsored by Emmanuel Saez and will be at IRLE from January 2022 to June 2022.

Mariele Macaluso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. She is currently focusing on the impact of institutional and technological changes on the labour market, especially related to migration and gender inequality. She is sponsored by Irene Bloemraad and will be at IRLE from January to April 2022.

Olatz Román is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute in Florence. She is currently working on topics in the fields of family and spatial economics. Her sponsor is Enrico Moretti and she will be at IRLE from January 2022 until May 2022.

Ingrid Semb is a PhD student at the University of Oslo. Her main research interests are within economics of education and health. Currently she is studying effects of grading policies in higher education. She is sponsored by Christopher Walters and will be at IRLE from September 2021 to June 2022.

Thiago Patto is a PhD student from the Insper Institute of Research – Sao Paulo. His research is focused on the relationship between wages and employment density.

Ulrike Unterhofer is a PhD student at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is currently studying topics related to active labor market policies and labor supply. She is sponsored by David Card and will be at the IRLE from January to March 2022.

Véra Zabrodina is a PhD student in economics at the University of Basel. She currently studies how individuals respond to the economic incentives created by health insurance, unemployment insurance, and income taxation systems. She is sponsored by David Card and will be at IRLE from January 2022 to March 2022.

Lily Zechner is a recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Doctoral Candidate in tax law at the University of Graz (Austria). She is conducting research at UC Berkeley as a Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow. Her research examines how various digital business models are treated under current tax rules, which largely refer to traditional legal categories predating the Internet era. Current projects explore how these rules are being enforced and how tax compliance and tax enforcement could be enhanced, with a focus on the European Union’s Value Added Tax in today’s “Platform Economy” and the role of platform operators and other intermediaries (third parties) in tax enforcement.