2025 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award Honorable Mention: Lucy Msall

Lucy Msall, will be awarded an honorable mention at the 118^th NTA Annual Conference, on November 6–8, 2025 in Boston, MA.

Lucy Msall is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Wealth and Income Inequality at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Next year she will join the University of Chicago Law School as an Assistant Professor. Lucy’s research studies taxation, regulation, and other fiscal policies. Her recent work is motivated by a desire to bring empirical evidence to policy debates regarding the capital gains tax base.

Lucy received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in June 2025. Her dissertation, based on joint work with Ole-Andreas Naess, was titled “Never-Realized Capital Gains.” The first part of the dissertation uses Norwegian administrative data to build novel data on unrealized capital gains and document new empirical facts about the distribution and composition of unrealized capital gains in all household portfolios in Norway.  The second part of the dissertation studies realization and inheritance responses following a reform that moved Norway from a system of stepped-up basis to a carryover basis system (i.e., one in which heirs inherit their predecessor’s latent capital gains tax obligation when they inherit appreciated assets).