Curriculum vitae
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Last updated: July 24, 2025
RESEARCH AREAS
Public Finance, Urban Economics, Education Finance
EDUCATION
Ph.D., Economics – University of British Columbia – 2025
Dissertation: Essays in Public Finance and the Economics of Multi-Level Government
Supervisory Committee
Kevin Milligan (Co-Supervisor) – Vancouver School of Economics, UBC
M. Marit Rehavi (Co-Supervisor) – Vancouver School of Economics, UBC
Victor Couture – Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
M.A., Economics – California State University, Sacramento – 2017
Thesis: Gains from Migration and Marriage: The Final Years of the Great Migration, 1965–1970
B.A., Film Studies – Columbia University – 2006
Editor-in-Chief, *The Columbia Review*
CURRENT RESEARCH ACTIVITY
Working papers
Who Benefits from Local Bond Elections? Evidence from California’s School Bond Reform
Research supported by the Lincoln Institute C. Lowell Harriss Fellowship.Is There A Subjective Well-Being Crisis Among Young Canadians? with Haifang Huang and John F. Helliwell. Revise and resubmit, Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de politiques.
Work in progress
State Transfers for Bond-Financed Capital Spending in California School Districts: Corrective Allocation and Implications for Municipalities
Private Insurer Exit and State-Provided Homeowners Insurance: Impacts on Households and Housing Markets in Fire-Prone States
Social Insurance Non-Compliance in China: Firm-Level Evidence in Institutional Context, with Wei Cui and Jeffrey Hicks
PUBLICATIONS
Journal articles
- How Well-Targeted Are Payroll Tax Cuts as a Response to COVID-19? Evidence from China, with Wei Cui and Jeffrey Hicks. International Tax and Public Finance 29(5), 2022.
Edited volumes
Contributions to the World Happiness Report, with John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shun Wang, and others. 2020–2023, 2025.
Happiness at different ages: The social context matters, with John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang and Shun Wang. In The Economics of Happiness, ed. M. Rojas. Springer, 2019. Also NBER Working Paper No. 25121.
Other articles
Retired working paper: Well-being analysis favours a virus-elimination strategy for COVID-19, with John F. Helliwell, Shun Wang, Lara B. Aknin, and Haifang Huang. NBER Working Paper 29092, August 2021.
Pre-doctoral: Managing grapevine trunk diseases in California’s Southern San Joaquin Valley, with Kendra Baumgartner, Vicken Hillis, Mark Lubell, and Jonathan Kaplan. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 70(3), 2019.
FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS, AND GRANTS
C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy – 2024
CIDER Small Grant ($13,115 data grant) – 2023
Research Fellowship in Subjective Well-Being, UBC VSE – 2018–2025
SSIS Dean’s Award and Curry Scholarship in Economics, CSU Sacramento, 2016–2017
SELECTED CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
WHY Symposium on Policy Evaluation and Causal Inference – 2024
UBC Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate Summer Symposium – 2024
Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting – 2021, 2024
International Institute of Public Finance Annual Congress – 2021, 2023
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Referee for Journal of Public Economics, European Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Happiness Studies, International Journal of Wellbeing
SKILLS
Statistical software: R, Stata
Spatial analysis: R (sf), ArcGIS
Machine learning: Neural networks, tree-based models; experiment tracking (W&B)
Programming & development: Python, SQL, Git; cloud deployment and continuous integration
Languages: English (native), Spanish (advanced/C1)