The National Tax Association Announces the NTA Fiscal Sustainability Travel Fellowship

Eric Heiser is a third-year PhD student in Economics at Columbia University, interested in government and, more specifically, taxes, voting systems, and personnel in the public sector. Before his PhD, he worked for two years at the Joint Committee on Taxation as a research assistant.

Tatiana Hiller is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California Davis, where she serves as the Graduate Student Coordinator of the Global Migration Center. She is an applied economist specializing in public and labor economics. Her research examines how institutions and demographic change shape individual and aggregate outcomes. Specifically, she studies how the structure of pension systems influences retirement behavior and elderly well-being, the economic consequences of aging in local labor markets, and the interplay between aging populations and migration. She is also part of the research team for the VenRePs Kids Survey Project, a longitudinal study on the well-being and integration of forcibly displaced children and adolescents in Colombia.

Minji Hong is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at Georgia State University, specializing in public and nonprofit financial management. She studies how local governments and nonprofit organizations navigate institutional and fiscal constraints to strengthen financial sustainability and effective service delivery. Her work has been published in Public Choice, Public Performance & Management Review, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, among others.

Erin Huffer Kramer is a PhD student in economics and education at Columbia University Teachers College. She studies the long-term effects of public investments in education, particularly how learning environments affect students’ educational and labor market choices in the future. Erin holds a BA in economics and public policy from Dartmouth College. She previously worked as a research assistant at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, where she studied various topics related to fiscal federalism, including the intersection of state, local, and federal tax and spending programs.

John Iselin is an Associate Analyst in the Tax Analysis Division of the Congressional Budget Office. He is a public and labor economist whose research focuses on U.S. federal and state fiscal policy, with publications on state tax credits, the migration responses of older adults to tax changes, high-income tax evasion, and the cyclicality of the social safety net. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland in 2025 and an M.P.P. from U.C. Berkeley. He has previously worked at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the California Policy Lab, and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Qilu (Lisa) Pan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at Purdue University’s Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business. Her research spans labor economics, public finance, and the economics of education, with a focus on how tax and transfer policies interact with labor market shocks. Her job market paper develops a theoretical and empirical framework to study the Earned Income Tax Credit’s role in shaping employment responses to wage shocks. She has additional work on Social Security Survivors Benefits, import competition, and college enrollment, and her teaching interests include microeconomics, labor economics, and applied econometrics.