Evan Soltas, 2024 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award Winner

Evan Soltas, has won the NTA’s Outstanding Dissertation Prize for 2024. He will accept the award at the 117^th NTA Annual Conference, on November 15, 2024 in Detroit, MI.

Evan is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, and next year he will join Princeton University as an Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May 2024.

His research interests lie at the intersection of public finance and urban economics. His dissertation, titled “Tax Policy, Housing Markets, and Redistribution,” contains two chapters studying the efficacy of tax incentives for low-income housing development, as well as a third chapter on means-tested transfer programs.

The first chapter evaluates the impacts and incidence of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the largest U.S. project-based subsidy for low-income housing, using new data on developer applications for competitively-awarded subsidies. The second chapter studies developer participation in New York City’s 421-a program, which gives property-tax abatements in exchange for creating “inclusionary” units within market-rate developments. The third chapter (coauthored with Charlie Rafkin and Adam Solomon) studies a classic rationale, known as “self-targeting,” for why transfer programs require households to actively apply rather than automatically enrolling them. Their paper argues that households’ take-up decisions allow the government to implicitly target transfers on characteristics that are infeasible to use explicitly as eligibility criteria, such as households’ consumption or permanent income.