Job market candidate, University of Michigan Economics

This paper measures the effect of homeownership tax deductions on home values using the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which substantially reduced the tax benefits to homeownership starting in 2018. Homes vary in exposure to the 2018 changes due to differences in the incomes, mortgage amounts, state income taxes, and property taxes of potential buyers. Event studies comparing the price growth of more and less exposed homes within the same city offer no evidence that home prices fell due to the tax change. Estimated standard errors rule out that even a quarter of the tax increase passed through to lower home prices within two years of the policy change. The tax increase reduced housing supply, as evidenced by a slowdown in new building in relatively exposed areas in cities with relatively elastic housing supply, which dampened the price decrease. Because prices did not fall when taxes increased, the after-tax cost of homeownership increased by roughly the same amount that taxes increased.

This paper estimates the optimal tax and transfer system when the social planner’s objective is to maximize utility of all individuals, including children, and can use household composition as a fixed tag. While existing research has estimated optimal transfer schedules, it has typically done so only in the context of adults, or without considering children’s utility as part of the planner’s objective function. Given the large extent to which U.S. transfer policy prioritizes redistribution to children, children’s consumption needs are of first order importance to optimal transfer policy analysis. We simulate the optimal tax and transfer system for unmarried households accounting for children’s consumption, adults’ consumption, and adults’ labor supply responses on the intensive and extensive margin. We place particular emphasis on estimating the optimal transfers to non-earning households of different compositions, and compare these estimates to expected benefits for non-earners in the United States. We find that current transfers to non-earners are well below optimal for all unmarried households, especially those with children.

Draft coming soon

This paper theoretically and empirically studies the role of firms in transmitting worker-level policies (e.g. mandated benefits, payroll taxes) into wages. When firms have labor market power, the wage impact of worker-level policies on a given type of worker can vary across firms. Using a static wage-posting model, we theoretically characterize the aspects of firms that determine how worker-level policies impact wages. Using administrative linked employer-employee data to study a German payroll tax reform, we find that similar workers experienced differential wage changes depending on the reform's impact on their employer's labor costs, one of the firm dimensions highlighted by the model.