Publications by Visiting Scholars | Current Visiting Scholars| Former Visiting Scholars

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston established the New England Public Policy Center in January 2005 to serve as a source of high-quality, objective analysis about policy issues in New England. As one way of achieving this goal, we invite researchers each year to the Center to serve as visiting scholars, working on economic or public policy issues of interest to the region. These paid position can be either full-time or part-time, and typically last between four months and a full academic year.

During their tenure, visiting scholar are expected to:

• Produce a substantive piece of research on a public policy issue of relevance to New England that can be published as a working paper or other publication of the Center (with the author retaining all future publishing rights to their work).
  
• Deliver a seminar on their research to the New England Study Group or a similar group of internal Fed economists.
  
• Interact with economists and other staff at the Center as a colleague—either informally or as a reviewer.
  
• Interact with researchers or policymakers around the region if such an opportunity arises in their area of expertise.

For more information about the program, please contact the Center at (617) 973-4257 or by email.

NEPPC Publications by Visiting Scholars

The Struggle for Tax Reform in Maine, 2003-2009
by Richard Woodbury, former Maine State Representative and National Bureau of Economic Research
NEPPC Discussion Paper No. 09-2 (September 2009)

House Prices and Risk Sharing
by Dmytro Hryshko, University of Alberta, María José Luengo-Prado Northeastern University and NEPPC Visiting Scholar, Bent E. Sørensen , University of Houston and CEPR
NEPPC Working Paper No. 09-3 (August 2009)

The Role of the Housing Market in the Response to Employment Shocks
by Jeffrey Zabel, Tufts University
NEPPC Working Paper No. 09-2 (July 2009)

Public-Private Partnerships, Cooperative Agreements, and the Production of Public Services in Small and Rural Municipalities
by Robert D. Mohr, University of New Hampshire, Steven Deller, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and John Halstead, University of New Hampshire
NEPPC Working Paper No. 08-4 (June 2008)

The Lengthening of Childhood
by David Deming and Susan Dynarski, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University
NEPPC Working Paper No. 08-3 (June 2008)

The Labor Market for Direct Care Workers
by Reagan Baughman and Kristin Smith, University of New Hampshire
NEPPC Working Paper No. 07-4 (November 2007)

The Impact of Wetlands Rules on the Prices of Regulated and Proximate Houses: A Case Study
by Katherine A. Kiel, College of the Holy Cross
NEPPC Working Paper No. 07-3 (November 2007)

The Fiscal Impact of College Attainment
by Philip A. Trostel, University of Maine
NEPPC Working Paper No. 07-2 (November 2007)

Do Loans Increase College Access and Choice?
Examining the Introduction of Universal Student Loans
by Bridget Terry Long, Harvard Graduate School of Education and NBER
NEPPC Working Paper No. 07-1 (November 2007)

↑ top

Current Visiting Scholars

Brian Knight
Brian Knight is an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Brown University and is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  He previously worked as an economist in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. He received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.S. in 1992 from Miami University. Research interests include political economy and local public finance. His research has been published in American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and Journal of Public Economics. Email Brian.

Richard Woodbury
Richard Woodbury is an economist, an administrator with the program on aging at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a former Representative in the Maine State Legislature.  His academic work has focused on the implications of population aging, and on the design of public and private retirement policies.  In the Maine legislature, he chaired the tax committee, as well as the joint select committee on property tax reform.  He also served on the insurance and financial services committee, and the joint select committee on future Maine prosperity.  His research as a Visiting Scholar deals with the design of state pension plans in New England, and with the political economy of recent tax reform initiatives in Maine.  He is a graduate of Williams College and received a PhD in economics from Harvard University. Email Dick.

Junfu Zhang
Junfu Zhang is an assistant professor of economics at Clark University. He specializes in applied microeconomics. His research interests include entrepreneurship and job creation, labor market effects of business decisions, regional development, and racial housing segregation. Zhang received a B.A. from Renmin University of China and a Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University. He was a dissertation fellow at the Brookings Institution during 2000-2001. Before joining Clark University in 2006, he worked as a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Email Junfu.

Former Visiting Scholars

Reagan Baughman
Reagan Baughman was a Visiting Scholar at the Center during the summer of 2007. She is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of New Hampshire. While visiting the NEPPC, she worked on a project on the determinants of wages, occupational selection and turnover for nursing and home health aides. Dr. Baughman specializes in the fields of health, labor and public economics and also does research on health insurance coverage for low-income families. Her work has been published in the National Tax Journal, Papers and Proceedings of the American Economic Review, Demography and the Journal of Health Economics. She holds a B.A. in economics from Drew University and a Ph.D. in economics from Syracuse University. After graduate school, she completed a two-year fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy program at the University of Michigan. Email Reagan.

Susan Dynarski
Susan M. Dynarski is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy and Associate Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. She studies and teaches the economics of education and tax policy, and has a special interest in the interaction of inequality and higher education. She has been a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1999. Dynarski has studied the impact of grants and loans on college attendance; the impact of state policy on college completion rates; and the distributional aspects of college savings incentives. She has testified on her research to the U.S. Senate and the President's Commission on Tax Reform. Her research has been published in academic and policy journals, as well as featured in the popular media. Dynarski earned an AB in social studies at Harvard College, an MPP at Harvard, and a PhD in economics at MIT. Email Susan.

Katherine Kiel
Katherine Kiel is an Associate Professor of Economics at the College of the Holy Cross. Her fields of interest are urban and environmental economics. Her current research focuses on the impact of various kinds of pollution and land use regulations on house prices. She has also published in the areas of real estate price indices, racial discrimination in the housing market, and on the demand for environmental quality in the United States, with her work appearing in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics and other peer-reviewed journals. Katherine received her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego and her A.B. from Occidental College. She has been awarded research grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and serves on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Advisory Council on Clean Air Compliance. Email Katherine.

Maria Luengo-Prado
María José Luengo-Prado is an Associate Professor of Economics at Northeastern University. Her research interests include Macroeconomics and Public Economics. Her research to date has focused on understanding households' consumption and savings decisions under uncertainty and the effect of these decisions on the broader economy. In particular, she has studied the dual role of housing (and other durable goods) as consumption and savings. For example, Dr. Luengo-Prado has examined the impact of lower down payments on consumption volatility, and the role of housing on explaining the wealth distribution.  Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the International Economic Review, the Jornal of Monetary Economics,  the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Review of Economic Dynamics.  Dr. Luengo-Prado has also written on the use of vouchers to improve education and several aspects of the airline industry.  While visiting the NEPPC, Dr. Luengo-Prado will investigate the effect of home equity loans on consumption smoothing. Dr. Luengo-Prado holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University, an M.A. in Economics from the Katholique University of Leuven, Belgium,  and a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Salamanca, Spain. Email Maria.

Robert Mohr
Robert Mohr is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of New Hampshire. His research focuses on public finance, innovation, and environmental policy. His work on New England regional issues include a study of current use property taxation and a study on the use of public-private partnerships by small and rural municipalities in New Hampshire. Robert's scholarly publications include contributions to the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Contributions to Economic Analysis and Policy, Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, Ecological Economics, and Land Economics. At the University of New Hampshire, he teaches graduate courses in microeconomic theory and public finance and undergraduate courses in microeconomics, public policy and environmental economics. Robert holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His favorite season in New England is fall. Email Robert .

Katherine Swartz
Katherine Swartz was a Visiting Scholar at the Center from October 2006 to July 2007. She is Professor of Health Policy and Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Swartz was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. for 10 years before joining the faculty at the School of Public Health. From September 2000 through June 2001, she was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Her current research interests focus on the population without health insurance and efforts to increase access to health care coverage; reasons for and ways to control episodes of care that involve extremely high expenditures; and how to pay for expanded health insurance coverage. Since November 1995, Dr. Swartz has been the editor of Inquiry, a journal that focuses on health care organization, provision and financing. Dr. Swartz’s new book, Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do, was published in June 2006. The book’s proposal for government-sponsored reinsurance for people with very high expenditures is being discussed in a number of states as a policy option for expanding insurance coverage. Dr. Swartz was the 1991 recipient of the David Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management for research done before the age of 40 that has had a significant impact on public policy. Email Katherine.

Bridget Terry-Long
Bridget Terry Long was a Visiting Scholar at the Center during the summer and fall of 2006. She is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Using the theory and methods of economics, Dr. Long studies the transition from secondary to higher education and beyond. Her work has focused on college access and choice, factors that influence college student outcomes, and the behavior of postsecondary institutions. Past projects have examined the effects of financial aid programs, the impact of postsecondary remediation, and the influence of class size and faculty characteristics on student persistence. Current projects include an aid simplification study, analysis of the growing gender gap in college enrollment, and research on community colleges.
Dr. Long received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the Harvard University Department of Economics and her A.B. from Princeton University. She is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She received the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and has been awarded numerous research grants from organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Ford Foundation. In July 2005, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured her as one of the "New Voices" in higher education. Email Bridget.

Philip Trostel
Philip Trostel was a Visiting Scholar at the Center during the summer of 2007. He is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Maine, where he holds a joint appointment with the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center and the Department of Economics. In addition, Dr. Trostel is a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education. He earned a PhD in economics from Texas A&M University. He has previously worked at North Carolina State University, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, University of Warwick (England), Dartmouth College, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Trostel is an applied microeconomist specializing in public finance. Most of his research focuses on higher education policy, human capital, and fiscal policy. His research has been supported by grants awarded from the National Science Foundation, American Educational Research Association, Brookings Institution, and U.S. Economic Development Administration. He has published articles in the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Monetary Economics, National Tax Journal, Economic Inquiry, Labour Economics, Review of Regional Studies, Education Economics, and other refereed journals. In addition, he has written dozens of newspaper opinion columns and policy reports intended for general audiences. He has also made numerous appearances before committees of the Maine Legislature and on Maine television and radio stations. Email Philip.

Jeffrey Zabel
Jeffrey Zabel is an Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University, a Research Associate at the Center for Real Estate at MIT, and a Fellow at the NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy.  His current research is in the areas of K-12 education, welfare economics, urban and real estate economics, and environmental economics.  Recent research on New England public policy issues includes affordable housing in the greater Boston area, the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act, and Proposition 2 ½. Email Jeff.

↑ top