The work behind the mentorship.
Both founders are active researchers. This is the academic work they bring into every session, including the papers, projects, and institutions they work with.
Bhimraj Singh Bhuller
Predoctoral Researcher, MIT FutureTech (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) & MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy) · Full bio →
The Marginal Taxation of American Labor Supply
The U.S. has a plethora of federal and state tax and benefit programs, each with its own, typically major, work incentives and disincentives. Collectively, they place a large share of workers, particularly low-wage workers, in high net (of benefits) tax brackets. This paper uses the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to assess how our fiscal policies, in unison, impact work incentives. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program that incorporates cash-flow constraints and all major federal and state tax and benefit policies. We use TFA in conjunction with the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances to calculate Americans' remaining lifetime marginal net tax rates (LMTRs), defined as the present expected value of additional current and future taxes, net of benefits, divided by a given increase in current labor earnings. Thus, the LMTR captures double taxation associated with saving a portion of one's additional current earnings. Our findings are striking: over half of working-age Americans face LMTRs above 40 percent, and many low-resource households face rates above 50 or 70 percent. Such high work disincentives may be locking large segments of the poor into poverty, while top-resource households also face major work disincentives. Finally, double taxation matters: the median LMTR is 43.1 percent, nearly one third larger than the median current-year marginal net tax rate.
- Professor Alan Auerbach is former Chair of the UC Berkeley Economics Department and previously served as Economics Department Chair at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Laurence Kotlikoff is William Fairfield Warren Professor of Economics at Boston University and former Chair of BU Economics.
- Dr. Victor Ye is Lead Research Scientist at Opendoor and a fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
Modeling Daily FTSE 100 Returns with ARIMA and EGARCH Volatility Dynamics
This paper studies the dynamic behavior of daily FTSE 100 returns over the period 2000-2025, with particular emphasis on volatility clustering, persistence, and asymmetry. After establishing that the log index level is difference-stationary using a battery of unit-root and structural-break tests, the analysis proceeds on daily log differences. A parsimonious ARIMA(2, 1, 0) specification is selected for the conditional mean, while conditional heteroskedasticity is modeled using ARCH-class processes. Symmetric GARCH, GARCH-in-Mean, and asymmetric volatility models (GJR-GARCH and EGARCH) are estimated and evaluated using likelihood-based criteria and standardized-residual diagnostics. The results show strong and persistent volatility clustering, statistically significant asymmetry in the response of volatility to shocks, and evidence of a time-varying risk-return relationship. A hybrid ARIMA(2, 1, 0)-EGARCH(1, 1) model jointly captures weak linear dependence in returns and highly persistent, asymmetric volatility, providing a coherent and empirically well-specified description of FTSE 100 return dynamics.
Macroeconomic Populism in Mexico and Peru: An Investigation towards the Structure of Economic Populism in Garcia's Peru and Portillo's Mexico and its Effect on the Macroeconomy
This paper begins by defining populism and examining how it shapes economic policy making, then analyzes the populist periods in Mexico and Peru. It studies the historical and political conditions that shaped these episodes and compares changes in fiscal and monetary policy, trade policy, real wages, inflation, exchange rates, unemployment, and inequality. The paper finds that both Garcia's Peru and Portillo's Mexico followed the lifecycle of macroeconomic populism: early economic gains gave way to fiscal mismanagement and ultimately ended with greater economic disruption than the initial gains.
Research details forthcoming
Additional research details will be added once titles, co-authors, abstracts, and public links are ready to publish.
Timothy Nguyen
Predoctoral Researcher, Wharton Finance Research Center · Full bio →
The Effect of Tobin's q Ratio on Corporate Investment: Evidence from the U.S. Firm Panel Data Set
This paper examines how Tobin's q, a market-based measure of investment opportunities, shapes corporate investment decisions across a panel of 1,962 U.S. firms. The project begins from the central prediction of q-theory: when financial markets value a firm's installed capital highly relative to its replacement cost, the firm should have stronger incentives to expand investment. The empirical work tests that prediction using firm-level panel data, moving from pooled OLS to fixed-effects models and a fixed-effects instrumental-variable specification in order to address persistent firm heterogeneity and potential endogeneity. The results show a consistently positive relationship between Tobin's q and investment: pooled OLS estimates an investment elasticity of 0.24, fixed effects raise the estimate to 0.28, and the fixed-effects IV model produces an elasticity of 0.34. The paper also evaluates how financial controls, firm characteristics, and model choice affect the estimated relationship. Overall, the findings suggest that market valuation contains meaningful information about corporate investment behavior, while careful econometric design is necessary to separate that signal from firm-specific fundamentals and financing constraints.
Trade Liberalization and Economic Growth: Evidence from WTO Accession
This paper studies whether trade openness and WTO accession promote long-run income growth using a panel of 141 countries from 1995 to 2025. The project treats liberalization as a multi-dimensional process rather than a single policy switch, examining how export exposure, accession timing, domestic institutions, and global demand conditions interact with GDP per capita growth. The empirical strategy combines pooled OLS, fixed effects, random effects, difference-in-differences, and instrumental-variable approaches to distinguish the effect of trade integration from country-specific development paths and worldwide macroeconomic shocks. A Bartik shift-share instrument is used to strengthen identification by exploiting external variation in trade exposure across countries. The paper also pays attention to why the benefits of openness may differ across economies: countries with stronger institutions, more adaptable export sectors, and greater absorptive capacity may convert access to world markets into growth more effectively than countries facing adjustment frictions. The result is a research design that connects classic trade theory with modern panel-data methods and policy questions about globalization, institutional readiness, and development strategy.
The Effect of Tobin's q Ratio on Corporate Investment
A sample empirical economics paper using the Hall and Hall U.S. corporate panel to study how investment responds to Tobin's q. The paper is designed as a transparent example of applied econometric writing: it begins with an economic theory of investment, translates that theory into a testable firm-level regression, and then progressively improves the specification as new identification concerns appear. The analysis builds from baseline pooled OLS to models with financial controls, firm fixed effects, Hausman testing, and IV robustness checks. Along the way, it explains why omitted firm characteristics, financing conditions, and measurement issues can change the interpretation of the coefficient on Tobin's q. For students, the paper shows how an empirical research question can move from theory to data, model selection, statistical evidence, and evaluation without losing the economic intuition behind the result.
The Macroeconomic Consequences of Large Devaluations
This research examines how large currency devaluations reshape macroeconomic outcomes after a sharp change in the relative price of domestic and foreign goods. The project studies adjustment across output, prices, trade balances, external accounts, and real activity, with attention to why some economies recover quickly while others experience persistent contraction or inflationary pressure. A central question is whether devaluations operate mainly through expenditure switching, financial frictions, balance-sheet effects, or changes in imported-input costs. Research support involves tracing the economic mechanisms that connect exchange-rate movements to aggregate outcomes and helping organize the empirical and conceptual material needed to compare devaluation episodes across countries and time.
Tariffs, Vertical Specialization, and Real Exchange Rate Dynamics
This project studies how tariffs interact with global production networks and real exchange-rate dynamics in economies where goods cross borders multiple times before reaching final consumers. The research focuses on vertical specialization, imported intermediate inputs, and the way trade policy can move through supply chains rather than stopping at the border. Tariffs may affect not only final prices, but also firms' sourcing decisions, production costs, competitiveness, and measured real exchange rates. Research support centers on connecting theory about trade costs and production linkages with empirical patterns in tariffs, input-output exposure, and exchange-rate adjustment. The project is especially relevant for understanding why modern tariff shocks can have effects that differ from textbook models built around final-goods trade alone.
MNE Resilience and Natural Disaster Exposure
This research studies how multinational enterprises respond to natural-disaster exposure across their global subsidiary networks. The project examines whether firms with geographically diversified subsidiaries, deeper internal networks, or stronger organizational capacity are better able to absorb localized shocks and maintain operations after disasters. It connects questions from international business, development, and firm resilience: when one location is hit by a disaster, can a multinational reallocate production, financing, management attention, or supply-chain activity across the rest of its network? Research support focuses on the logic of measuring exposure at the subsidiary level and linking disaster risk to firm behavior, network structure, and post-shock adaptation. The broader goal is to understand how global firms manage physical climate risk and why resilience may vary sharply across companies and countries.
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