Brendan Moore, 2026 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award Winner

Brendan Moore, has won the NTA’s Outstanding Dissertation Prize for 2026. He will accept the award at the 119th NTA Annual Conference, on November 6–8, 2025 in Boston, MA.

Brendan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan, and next year he will join the University of Notre Dame as an Assistant Professor of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in June 2024.Brendan studies how workers experience job loss and how social insurance policies can better help them navigate economic shocks. During his Ph.D., he worked for three years as an economist at the Washington State Employment Security Department. This collaboration led to his dissertation, titled “Incomplete Take-Up, Optimal Policy, and Tax Design”, which contains four chapters. The first three chapters (co-authored with Casey McQuillan) consider how unemployment insurance(UI) take-up and labor supply responses are shaped by hassle costs, stigma, benefit generosity, and expanded coverage. The fourth chapter (co-authored with Beomyun Kim) considers the fiscal implications of a seasonal consumption tax in a tourism-dependent economy. The first chapter evaluates a large-scale field experiment where likely unemployed individuals who had not claimed UI received a letter with information about the UI program. These informational letters increased applications and receipt by reducing learning costs and stigma. Those the intervention induced to receive UI found re-employment faster following job loss, likely due to binding work search requirements. The second chapter shows that more generous UI also increases take-up, an additional fiscal externality that policymakers must consider when setting benefit levels. The third chapter documents that UI only modestly slows job search for low-income workers who barely qualify for benefits but substantially boosts their wages and job quality upon returning to the labor market. The fourth and final chapter shows that, in a tourism-dependent economy, taxing consumption more heavily in the peak-season and less in the off-season (rather than a uniform flat rate) is more efficient and shifts tax burden from local residents to tourists