Policy
Three policy designs I work on — Opportunity Zones, the Retirement Savings for Americans Act, and the 80-80 wage subsidy — plus my reports and analyses.
I work most actively on three policy designs. Each entry below lays out the problem the policy is meant to solve, what the relevant empirical literature says, and my contribution to the evidence base. The full list of my reports and analyses is below; essays and commentary are on the Writing page.
Opportunity Zones
Capital-gains incentives for investment in low-income census tracts
The problem
Private investment is unevenly distributed across U.S. communities. Many low-income census tracts have lost population, employment, and tax base for decades, and conventional credit markets price these places as unattractive destinations for capital. Federal housing and community-development policy has historically leaned on direct subsidy rather than tax-side incentives that route private capital toward distressed places. The Opportunity Zones provision of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act tested whether a temporary capital-gains tax preference could change that calculus and pull private investment into roughly 8,700 designated low-income tracts.
The state of research
Early empirical work on Opportunity Zones produced cautious or null findings on employment, earnings, and housing prices, in part because outcomes were measured soon after designation and in part because the program sets a low bar for what counts as a qualifying investment. More recent work, using better data on construction permits, address activity, business formation, and capital flows, has documented meaningful effects on the built environment and on investment volume in designated tracts. The literature now reads more affirmatively on physical investment, particularly housing, while remaining uncertain about whether the benefits accrue to incumbent residents or to in-movers. Open questions include the durability of investment after the tax preference expires, the scope of displacement, and whether the geographic targeting can be tightened in any extension or successor program.
My role
I lead EIG's empirical research on Opportunity Zones and contribute to its policy analysis of the program's effects.
- The Impact of Opportunity Zones on Housing Supply (EIG, 2025), lead author. Difference-in-differences estimates using HUD USPS Administrative Data on Address Vacancies, with replication code on GitHub.
- Are Opportunity Zones Working? What the Literature Tells Us (EIG, 2023), co-author with Kenan Fikri. A synthesis of the empirical literature five years into the program.
- A short-form essay connecting the housing-supply evidence to broader debates about housing scarcity: Opportunity Zones: A Quiet Revolution in Housing Policy
Retirement Savings for Americans Act
A federal, portable retirement account with auto-enrollment and a low-income match
The problem
Nearly half of U.S. private-sector employees, about 55 million people, do not have access to an employer-provided retirement plan, according to my September 2026 update of EIG's retirement fast facts. The coverage gap concentrates among low-wage workers, part-time workers, independent contractors, and employees of small firms. The result is a two-tier retirement system: middle- and higher-income workers accumulate substantial tax-advantaged wealth over a career, while the bottom half of the earnings distribution arrives at retirement with little outside Social Security. State-level auto-IRA programs have begun to close the gap in a handful of states, but coverage remains a function of geography, employer size, and worker classification rather than a baseline feature of working life.
The state of research
The behavioral economics of retirement saving is one of the most replicated bodies of evidence in applied microeconomics. Auto-enrollment sharply raises participation across income groups; default contribution rates and default investment vehicles shape long-run wealth accumulation; and matching contributions have larger participation effects when they are simple and salient. Evidence from state auto-IRA programs such as OregonSaves and CalSavers shows large take-up among workers newly offered access, and Australia's Superannuation Guarantee provides a long-running natural experiment in universal, portable, employment-linked retirement saving. The Retirement Savings for Americans Act (RSAA) is designed around this evidence base: a federally administered, portable account, automatic enrollment for workers without an employer plan, and a federal match aimed at low- and moderate-income earners. Open empirical questions concern crowd-out of existing employer plans, the design of the federal match, and the long-run distributional consequences of building a parallel federal account structure.
My role
My work in this area focuses on documenting the coverage gap and translating the behavioral and policy evidence for a broader audience. It has appeared in both a State of the Union address and a Trump administration executive order on the retirement access gap among U.S. workers.
- Public commentary on the coverage gap, including a live CBS News segment on the share of U.S. workers without an employer-sponsored retirement plan.
- Cited research and analysis underlying public discussion of RSAA, including a Forbes column by Teresa Ghilarducci that frames the proposal in light of the Australian model: A Retirement Fix For 69 Million American Workers: Australia Inspired
- Ongoing internal analysis at EIG supporting the institution's policy work on RSAA design and implementation.
80-80 Wage Subsidy
A targeted wage subsidy to raise earnings for low-wage workers
The problem
A large share of U.S. workers spend their careers in jobs that pay too little to support a household, even at full-time hours. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest existing wage-side transfer, but its structure leaves childless workers and many primary earners with only modest support, and its annual lump-sum delivery undermines its function as ongoing wage support. Minimum-wage policy can raise the floor but cannot target subsidies precisely to the workers and hours where earnings gains are most valuable. The 80-80 wage subsidy proposal fills that gap with a direct, paycheck-level transfer that raises the return to low-wage work across household types.
The state of research
The empirical literature on existing earnings subsidies is large and broadly supportive. EITC expansions are associated with sizable increases in labor force participation among single mothers and modest increases in earnings, with little evidence of large negative effects on hours among current workers. Evaluations of state-level EITC supplements and child credit expansions corroborate the basic finding: well-designed wage and family subsidies raise after-tax income at the bottom without unwinding work incentives. International experience, including the United Kingdom's Working Tax Credit and various wage-subsidy pilots, points in the same direction. Open empirical questions for the 80-80 design include incidence (how much of the subsidy is captured by workers versus employers), interactions with the broader safety net, and the fiscal cost under realistic take-up assumptions.
My role
I am one of the primary architects of the 80-80 wage subsidy proposal and the analyst behind its quantitative scoring.
- How to end low-wage work forever: An 80-80 wage subsidy proposal (EIG, 2025), co-author with Adam Ozimek. Sets out the policy design, eligibility, and projected effects.
- Part 1 and Part 2: the FAQ on Agglomerations, public-facing essays elaborating the proposal and responding to common objections.
- 80-80 wage subsidy simulator, a methods page for the underlying microsimulation, which combined CPS microdata with PolicyEngine-US household income schedules to estimate eligibility, fiscal cost, and distributional effects. The public Streamlit deployment is currently offline.
Reports
Reports and analyses I wrote or co-wrote, newest first. Co-authors are listed on each card.
The U.S. Retirement System: Fast Facts
About 76 million workers — nearly 52 percent of working Americans ages 18 to 64 — lack access to an employer-provided retirement plan, and only 37 percent of workers receive an employer contribution or match.
How to end low-wage work forever: An 80-80 wage subsidy proposal
The 80-80 proposal would subsidize low-wage paychecks directly, raising take-home pay without adding to employers' cost of hiring.
Are Opportunity Zones Helping High-Need Communities? EIG Responds to New York Times Op-Ed
A response to Corinth and Feldman's New York Times op-ed arguing that the evidence now shows Opportunity Zones drove investment into low-income communities, and that the critics' revised case against the policy does not hold.
The Impact of Opportunity Zones on Housing Supply
Opportunity Zone designation increased new housing construction by 70 percent in designated tracts, adding more than 416,000 residential addresses with little displacement from nearby areas.
The Great "Transfer"-mation: How American Communities Became Reliant on Income from Government
Government transfers grew from 8 percent of personal income in 1970 to almost 18 percent by 2022, leaving roughly half of U.S. counties substantially reliant on transfer income.
The American Worker Project: Toward a New Consensus
American workers are more prosperous than prior generations by most measures, but the pace of improvement has slowed, and public perception often lags the underlying data.
Living the good life or getting a bad deal?
Combining EPI's Family Budget Calculator with EIG's Distressed Communities Index to assess which U.S. communities offer families a good value proposition on cost of living versus well-being.
Evaluating the Trade-offs: Children's Well-being vs. Parents' Work Incentives
The history, goals, and trade-offs of the Child Tax Credit — anti-poverty tool versus tax relief for working parents — as the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 heads to the Senate.
Full vs. Hybrid: Examining the Consequences of How Americans Work Remotely
Full-remote work raises long-distance migration and destination-market housing prices, while hybrid work enables shorter moves without the same price effect.
Movers And Money: Mapping the Flow of Income During the Pandemic
An interactive tool tracing the origins and destinations of pandemic-era movers' taxable income, led by Manhattan's $16.5 billion in outflows and Florida's $39 billion net gain.
Are Opportunity Zones Working? What the Literature Tells Us
Studies that wait long enough to observe Opportunity Zones under fully finalized regulations find the strongest positive investment effects; many widely cited early studies end their analysis window too soon to detect them.
How Much Does Retirement Plan Coverage Vary by State and Income? An Updated Look.
In 2021, 69 million workers — 55.5 percent — lacked any employer-provided retirement plan, a gap concentrated among low-income earners and uneven across states.
Liquid Assets, Financial Shocks, and Entrances into Material Hardship
New Yorkers with $2,000 in liquid assets are substantially less likely to fall into material hardship after a financial shock than those with none, and the protective effect levels off above that amount.
Business Establishments Bloom in Booming Georgia
County-level QCEW data for the fourth quarter of 2022 show the post-pandemic surge in new business establishments persisting, with Georgia among the standout states.
GAO Report Underscores Excessive Use of Noncompetes
The GAO's report on noncompete agreements underscores their excessive and relatively indiscriminate use, including heavier use by large employers and little differentiation across classes of workers.
The Effects of Noncompete Agreement Reforms on Business Formation: A Comparison of Hawaii and Oregon
Hawaii's noncompete exemption for technology workers was associated with 10 percent more technology establishments, while Oregon's broader low-wage-worker reform showed no significant effect.