I conduct research across several fields in applied microeconomics. In addition to the pages linked below, my research is archived at Google Scholar, SSRN, and the NBER.
My most recent article, published in Global Finance Journal, is "Corporate Social Responsibility and Voting over Public Goods," with former student Sophie Wang. The main result indicates that, relative to an economy in which all public goods are publicly financed, the introduction of CSR lowers the total amount of public goods, as voters rationally anticipate that higher CSR will partially offset the consequences of lower public funding.
Another area of interest is education finance, at both the primary/secondary and college levels. In 2013, I published "Donating the Voucher," which considers an alternative tax treatment of private school enrollments. A more recent project, now forthcoming in Education Finance and Policy, with former students Kristy Fan and Tyler Fisher, estimates the Insurance Value of Financial Aid.
The latter paper is the latest in a longstanding research agenda on precautionary saving against income uncertainty. That research began in collaboration with Christopher Carroll, where we provided some of the first direct empirical evidence of precautionary saving, and continued with other work that analyzes the importance of saving motives beyond standard life cycle considerations.
I have been interested in entitlement programs, their economic implications and their potential reform, since my undergraduate thesis at Harvard. I wrote that thesis under the supervision of Martin Feldstein, with whom I collaborated on several projects related to Social Security reform in the late 1990s. This line of research also includes some work on federal health entitlement programs. In 2005, Jeffrey Liebman and Maya MacGuineas developed the "Nonpartisan Social Security Reform Plan." Here are an overview and the evaluation of the plan's financial effects by Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary.
In graduate school, I expanded my interest beyond Social Security to include private pensions, focusing on their incentive effects on retirement and saving behavior and on the ongoing shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans. These papers were published between 1997 and 2004 and featured collaborations with Dartmouth colleagues Alan Gustman and Jonathan Skinner. I was an early user of the Survey of Consumer Finances for much of this research, and I presented some reflections on the survey on the occasion of its 40th anniversary at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto in August 2023.
Also in graduate school, I became interested in fiscal policy and finance, particularly portfolio choice, taxation, and their interaction. Much of my early work in this area was conducted in collaboration with Jim Poterba, who was my graduate thesis adviser at MIT. I was recently invited to contribute a forthcoming chapter on Jim's research to The Palgrave Companion to MIT Economics.
My most cited research focuses on executive compensation, and in particular the way that some links between compensation and other aspects of corporate finance can be understood in a standard principal-agent framework. These 5 articles were all co-authored with Rajesh Aggarwal, whom I met shortly after arriving at Dartmouth, and were published between 1999 and 2006.