Biography

My research to date has focused on a number of questions in macroeconomic theory, with a particular focus on optimal policy theory in models of time inconsistency.
These are models in which expectations of future policy influence what it is possible to do in the present, and thus there is a present incentive to promise future actions that may no longer be optimal ex post.
My doctorate, from the University of Oxford, investigated new methods for solving models of this kind. Among other topics it explored the implications of choosing policy instruments when choice cannot be time-specific – that is, as if a Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ makes knowledge of time orthogonal to the policymaker’s information set. Policies derived in this manner have a number of intuitively appealing properties relative to those obtained by existing solution techniques.
During my time in Oxford I have been a College Lecturer at St Catherine’s College for four years, teaching undergraduate Macroeconomics and Public Economics courses, as well as teaching Macroeconomics classes for Oxford’s M.Phil programme.
My current research interests centre on models of dynamic optimal taxation when agents are privately informed about their idiosyncratic productivity levels, and in particular on the policy insights that can be gained by studying models of this kind through novel perturbation methods.