Casey C. McQuillan, 2026 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award Winner

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

Casey C. McQuillan is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Economics Department and The Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and will join the Economics Department at Stockholm University in Fall 2027. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in May 2026.His research focuses on public finance and labor economics, examining how policy shapes inequality, opportunity, and welfare through the interaction of social insurance, public benefits, and labor markets. Working closely with policymakers, he leverages administrative data, quasi-experimental methods, and large-scale field experiments to identify the causal effects of policy interventions. His dissertation, titled “The Causes and Consequences of Incomplete Unemployment Insurance Take-Up,” explores the causes and consequences of incomplete unemployment insurance (UI) take-up and the broader implications for social insurance design. Chapter 1 develops atheoretical framework for incomplete take-up arising from transaction costs and imperfect information, showing that reducing information frictions generates larger welfare gains than reducing transaction costs. Chapter 2 examines how UI generosity affects take-up and optimal policy, combining a theoretical model that extends the Baily-Chetty framework with empirical evidence that higher benefits substantially increase take-up. Chapter 3studies the effects of UI receipt on job search and re-employment for workers marginally attached to the labor force, showing that benefits minimally delay re-employment but substantially improve job quality, increasing hours and earnings over the following two years. Chapter 4 presents a field experiment providing information about UI to likely unemployed workers, finding that informational outreach increases take-up and modestly increases re-employment