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Evan Soltas

PhD Student, MIT Economics

I am a PhD student in economics at MIT. My current research is in the fields of public finance and labor economics.

I served as a Staff Economist at the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers from May 2021 to May 2022. From 2016 to 2018, I was a graduate student in economics at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship. I studied economics as well as statistics and machine learning at Princeton as an undergraduate.

My popular writing has appeared in Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vox. From 2012 to 2014, I co-wrote the daily "Wonkbook" public policy newsletter with Ezra Klein.

Working Papers

"The Impacts of Covid-19 Absences on Workers," with Gopi Shah Goda. Revise & resubmit, Journal of Public Economics.

| | Slides

"Self-Targeting in U.S. Transfer Programs," with Adam Solomon and Charlie Rafkin. Draft coming soon.

Publications

"The Price of Inclusion: Evidence from Housing Developer Behavior." Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics. Selected as Best Student Paper at the 2020 Urban Economics Association meeting.

| Preprint | | Slides | Replication Materials

"A Welfare Analysis of Occupational Licensing in U.S. States," with Morris M. Kleiner. Forthcoming, Review of Economic Studies.

| | Slides | Replication Materials

"A Natural Experiment on Discrimination in Elections," with David E. Broockman. Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 188 (August 2020): 104201.

| Preprint | | Slides | Replication Materials

Resources

csranks: confidence sets on ranks [Stata program]. Available on the SSC archive.

Census–NAICS 2012 Industry Code Crosswalk. Available on the Harvard Dataverse.

Original Input-Output Table from 1947 Interindustry Relations Study. Available on the Harvard Dataverse.