Consumer Confidence Increasing Despite Stalled Jobs Growth (commentary by Neil Thakral)
January 11, 2021 Forbes
Neil Thakral provided commentary in this article, citing his co-authored study on the anticipation and use of stimulus checks.
Neil Thakral
Neil Thakral
Nancy Donohue and Diane Elam Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs and Economics
Biography
Neil Thakral joined Brown University in 2018. His research interests are in labor, behavioral, and public economics as well as market design.
Research
Thakral’s research investigates the way people make decisions, with an emphasis on implications for the design of markets and incentives. Some of his recent work examines the effect of fluctuations in earnings on the decision of how much to work, focusing on workers who can flexibly choose their hours. Thakral has also done research on the optimal allocation of public housing. He proposes a new mechanism for allocating public housing that improves the matching between tenants and housing units by allowing households to trade off their preferences for different units and waiting times. He shows that implementing this in practice would lead to substantial welfare gains.
Publications
- "The Design of Public-Housing Policies," More Equal by Design: Economic Design Responses to Inequality, eds. Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym, Oxford University Press.
- “Matching with Stochastic Arrival,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC ’15, p. 343, 2015.
Teaching
MPA 2040 - Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation
Talks & Media
News|Recent News
Stimulus checks are on their way — economists give one important reason why it bodes well to wait (Neil Thakral cited)
January 1, 2021 Market Watch
This article cites Neil Thakral on what happens when people have time to prepare for financial windfall.
Anticipation and Consumption
November 27, 2020
In "Anticipation and Consumption," Neil Thakral analyzes how the timing of information affects consumption decisions using data from the 2008 stimulus payments in the US and data from randomized experiments in Kenya and Malawi.