2024 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award Honorable Mention: Sara Spaziani

Sara Spaziani, will be awarded an honorable mention at the 117th NTA Annual Conference, on November 15, 2024 in Detroit, MI.

Sara Spaziani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick. Her primary research interests are in public economics and labor economics. In particular, she studies how public policies and economic shocks impact workers, employers, and the labor market in order to inform optimal policy design and reduce existing inequalities.

Sara received her Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University in May 2024. Her dissertation, titled “Essays in Public and Labor Economics,” combines economic theory with the analysis of administrative and survey data to explore the welfare and labor market effects of government policies and economic shocks. The first chapter examines the optimal design of unemployment insurance financing policies, comparing two approaches: experience rating, where unemployment tax rates are assigned to employers based on their layoffs, and coinsurance, where all the employers are assigned the same tax rate. The study derives a sufficient statistics formula for the optimal degree of experience rating and empirically implements the formula for South Carolina and Colorado to evaluate the local optimality of their unemployment insurance financing policies. The second chapter investigates whether gender quota policies, which regulate the gender composition of candidates on electoral lists and government bodies, can additionally promote the election of women in top government positions, focusing on three gender quota policies in Italy. The third chapter, joint with Livia Alfonsi and Mary Namubiru, uses a high-frequency panel dataset to reveal large and persistent gendered labor market effects of COVID-19 for skilled Ugandan workers.