2024 NTA Equity & Inclusion Travel Fellowship Recipients

The Equity & Inclusion Travel Fellowship provides conference travel funding with the goal of increasing participation in and creating long-lasting relationships with the National Tax Association and its activities among underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students and early career Ph.D.s/J.D.s engaged in the theory and practice of public finance, including public taxation, spending, and borrowing. The Fellowships will cover hotel, conference registration, and a travel cost offset.

Underrepresented minority scholars face a variety of systemic barriers and may lack peers, role models, or mentors in their own departments and networks. Professional conferences, like the NTA, are a helpful place to build relationships outside of one’s own academic and professional settings. The aim of this fellowship is to provide an opportunity for junior scholars to participate in and network with the NTA community.

All Ph.D. or J.D. advanced graduate students (4th year or later for Ph.D. candidates, 2nd or 3rd year for law students) or early career graduates (fewer than 6 years since graduate degree) with interests in the theory and practice of public finance, who are members of an underrepresented minority group. Underrepresented minorities include persons who identify as American Indian, Alaskan Native, Black (not of Hispanic origin), Hispanic (including persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Central or South American origin) or, Pacific Islander. Eligible fellowship recipients will also be a U.S. Citizen, Permanent Legal Resident, DACA or Eligible Non-Citizen (as defined by FAFSA). 

The travel fellowship is inspired by the successful American Economic Association URM Travel Grants and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Equity and Inclusion Fellowships.

This year’s recipients and the previous recipients will be recognized at the 116th Annual Conference on Taxation.  The conference will take place Thursday, November 2 through Saturday, November 4, 2023 at the Grand Hyatt Denver in Denver, Colorado. 

Organizers
Steven Dean, Jacob Goldin, Laura Kawano, Kim Rueben, & Michael Udell

Sponsors
The funding for this event is generously provided by the NTA and the Office of Tax Policy Research, University of Michigan.

2024 Recipients

Sarah Akyena is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Georgia State University, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

Her research interests include labor, public finance, education economics, poverty, and inequality. 

Her work broadly examines behavioral responses to public policies, the sources of disparities in economic outcomes, and how differences across individuals and households explain some of these inequalities. One area of her research focuses on the implications and unintended consequences of public policies that address inequalities in the labor market and human capital achievement. In another work, she explores the impact of household and individual characteristics on labor market and education outcomes. Currently, she is working on her job market paper, which investigates whether the effort of policymakers to reduce welfare dependency by using wage subsidies to promote employment has an unintended effect on job match quality. 

She is a Data Strategy Fellow at Achieve Atlanta. As a fellow, she is involved in projects on the effectiveness of policies that encourage college enrollment and graduation, especially among students from low-income households. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (Atlanta-FED). At the Atlanta-FED, she was involved in projects on racial disparities in the labor market, the labor supply and welfare impacts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Acts, and the implications and tax burden of the growing electric vehicle adoption. She received an MSc in Mathematical Science from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Ghana. She is one of the recipients of the 2024 Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Equity and Inclusion Student Fellowship and the Mastercard Foundation Scholar Award at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) South Africa.

Andrew Luis Granato is a PhD candidate in financial economics at the Yale School of Management and a recent JD graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was active in the Yale Journal on Regulation (JREG) and La Socieded of Latine Law Students (LaSo). Before grad school, he was a Senior Associate Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His tax research focuses on the tax treatment of life insurance policies and the employment of valuation methods in the gift and estate tax setting.

 

 

Cara Haughey is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the intersection of public and health economics and considers how individual environments and circumstances impact health and wellbeing. Her most recent work looks at how charitable giving to social service charities, such as food pantries, determines access to public goods. Prior to graduate school, Cara worked in the nonprofit sector, including an animal rescue and a health and nutrition organization.

 

Lady Ikeya is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, with a focus on public finance, tax policy, welfare programs, and labor supply. Her research explores the complexities of tax enforcement, collection mechanisms, and how these policies influence labor markets and social welfare programs. Prior to starting her Ph.D., she earned an MPA from BYU, where she developed a strong foundation in public administration and policy analysis.

 

 

 

Md Asaduzzaman Nur is an aspiring economist currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. He has completed both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Bangladesh. His research interests are broadly focused on Environmental Taxation, Tax Incidence, and Taxation and Labor Supply. Currently, he is working on a project examining how different subsidy instruments provide incentives for over-utilization of wind farm facilities, potentially resulting in long-term performance degradation.

 

 

Yung-Yu Tsai is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri, Harry S Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. Her research interests focus on public finance, public policy, and social equity. Her work examines how government taxation and financial interventions contribute to mitigating socioeconomic inequality across race/ethnicity, gender, and social class. Her recent research explores topics such as the impact of taxing elite colleges on equitable access to higher education, the effects of property reassessment on housing justice and wealth inequality, the influence of on-campus residence on students’ persistence and long-term outcomes, and the impact of cash transfers on household fertility decisions and investment in children’s education.

 

Previous Fellows
2023 NTA Equity & Inclusion Travel Fellowship
2022 NTA Equity & Inclusion Travel Fellowship
2021 NTA Equity & Inclusion Travel Fellowship