The Hoover Institution has established a new two-week visiting program, the Campbell Visiting Fellows. The goal of the program is to bring a set of researchers as visitors who are all focused on research in one general topic area to be present at Hoover during a single two week period, exchanging ideas, interacting with each other, working collaboratively if they wish, and also interacting with other scholars in their field at Hoover at Stanford more broadly.
May 2023 | Fiscal federalism, the performance of state and local governments, taxation, and other related themes
Convened by Jeff Clemens, Hoover Visiting Fellow and Joshua Rauh, Hoover Senior Fellow
David R. Agrawal
David R. Agrawal is an associate professor in the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration and in the Department of Economics at the University of Kentucky. He is also a fellow in the CESifo Research Network and editor in chief of International Tax and Public Finance. Agrawal’s research focuses on state and local tax policy, including theoretical and empirical models of fiscal competition and fiscal federalism. He is particularly interested in the welfare effects of decentralized policies, the effect of digitalization on subnational taxation, and the interjurisdictional mobility of tax bases. He has received both the Peggy and Richard Musgrave Prize and the Young Economists Award from the International Institute of Public Finance. Agrawal holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan, an MPP from the University of California–Berkeley, and a BA in economics and political science from the University of Connecticut.
Lisa De Simone
Lisa De Simone is an associate professor of accounting at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas–Austin. Her research examining how multinational corporations and individuals respond to tax incentives worldwide has been published in top accounting and finance journals. She teaches tax and personal finance courses to students in undergraduate and graduate business and accounting programs. She earned a BA in economics and German studies from Stanford in 2002, an MS in accounting from the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 2008, and a PhD in accounting from the University of Texas–Austin in 2013. Prior to returning to Austin, De Simone spent seven years on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Other previous work experience includes transfer pricing consulting for Ernst & Young and litigation consulting support for the Analysis Group.
Julia Payson
Julia Payson is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. Beginning in July 2023, she will be an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Political Science. During the 2020–21 academic year, she was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. Julia studies representation, political institutions, and public policy in state and local governments in the United States. Her research has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Politics and the American Political Science Review. Her book When Cities Lobby (Oxford University Press, 2022) documents how local officials use lobbyists to compete for power in a political environment characterized by intense urban-rural polarization and growing hostility between cities and state legislatures. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2017.
Nirupama Rao
Nirupama Rao is an assistant professor of business economics and public policy at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns the economic effects of fiscal policy, focusing on its impact on firm production, investment, and pricing decisions. She has studied how excise taxes on oil production affect the extraction decisions of domestic producers, the effectiveness of federal tax credits for research and development, and the composition and importance of corporate deferred taxes. In other work, she has examined how regulation and taxation interact in alcohol markets and the implications of pricing behavior for tax pass-through.
She is a recipient of the National Tax Association Dissertation Award and the 2019 Journal of Public Economics Atkinson award for the best paper published in the prior three years. In 2010, Rao completed her PhD in economics at MIT, where she previously earned her undergraduate degree. Prior to attending graduate school, she worked at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She served from 2015 through 2016 as a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, DC.
Nathan Seegert
Nathan Seegert collaborates with policy makers and businesses to further our understanding of the economy. He cofounded the Utah Economic Surveys, the Banking, Entrepreneurship, Regulations, and Taxes Study, and the Utah Tax Invitational (UTAXI) and was a co–principal investigator on Utah’s Health and Economic Recovery Outreach (HERO) Project. His work has been published in top academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Public Economics; and has been featured in media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Harvard Business Review, CBS News’s MoneyWatch, Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Atlantic. Seegert currently teaches microeconomics as an associate professor (with tenure) in the Finance Department of the University of Utah, where he is a David Eccles Faculty Fellow and a faculty advisor for the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. He is a member of the Utah Governor's Economic Council, an Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center research fellow, and a partner with Texas A&M GeoServices.
Eric Zwick
Eric Zwick studies the interaction between public policy and corporate behavior, with a focus on fiscal stimulus, taxation, and housing policy. His research draws insights from finance and behavioral economics while using a variety of methods: new data, natural experiments, theory, and anecdotal exploration. He is particularly interested in the problems that small and medium-sized private firms and new ventures face, from the perspectives of owners, investors, managers, and workers. A secondary area of interest concerns the role of bounded rationality and imperfect information in the design of policies that promote behavior change. This work focuses on determinants of habit formation in health and workforce productivity settings.
Zwick earned a PhD and an MA in business economics from Harvard University and a BA in economics and mathematics with high honors from Swarthmore College. Prior to attending graduate school, he worked as a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as a web and software developer for several start-ups and nonprofits.
