Scholarly Interests:

My research is primarily in the field of Public Economics and includes themes from Behavioural Economics. The bulk of my work has evaluated Canadian income support programs, such as the Canada Worker Benefit (CWB), Old Age Security (OAS), and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS). I evaluate programs on their stated objectives, such as incentivizing work and expanding labour supply for the CWB. I also examine issues of take-up and targeting, which respectively concern non-enrolment of eligible individuals and the characteristics of the population of beneficiaries. I look at the reasons why eligible people may not enroll, and what can be done to get more benefit dollars into the wallets of the beneficiaries they are intended for. Lastly, I also examine the characteristics of enrollees and non-enrollees to assess program efficiency at delivering support to people in need.

Teaching Statement:

To teach economics well you have to be a human, not the ‘econ’ you find in the textbooks. In being human, I place a priority on building connections with my students and cultivating the confidence that economics is for them. Being human also means recognizing the diversity of student learning styles, strengths, and backgrounds. I structure my courses to empower students to learn and demonstrate their learning in the ways that work best for them as individuals. Lastly, I plan my classes to be engaging, instead of a one-way flow of information, and am always experimenting with new approaches in the classroom. Ultimately, I teach in this way because I think that being human is economical: it maximizes learning under the constraints of the student experience.