2021 Dissertation Award Honorable Mention: Daniel Prinz

Daniel Prinz, Harvard University, will be awarded an honorable mention at the 2021 Virtual NTA Annual Conference, on November 19, 2021 on Zoom.

Daniel is a Research Economist and Country Programme Manager at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Centre for Tax Analysis in Developing Countries. His work covers topics in public finance, including social insurance, taxation, and inequality.

His work on health insurance programs has documented the screening behavior of insurance companies in the health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, the consequences of Medicaid privatization in Texas and New York, and the role of liquidity sensitivity in prescription drug use in Medicare. His work on disability insurance programs provides evidence on the employment sources of disability insurance claims and the consequences of design features of disability insurance programs. He has also conducted research on labor markets during the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. and developing countries, tax evasion, payroll tax subsidies, and health inequality. He manages technical assistance and capacity building work at Ethiopia’s Ministry of Finance, focusing on tax design.

Daniel received his Ph.D. in Health Policy and Economics from Harvard University in 2021. His dissertation is titled Essays on Social Insurance. The first chapter, joint work with Bastian Ravesteijn studies the consequences of employer cost sharing in disability insurance. This chapter develops a framework to study optimal disability insurance when employers exhibit moral hazard and then illustrates the insights of this framework using a reform that made employers responsible for paying part of the disability insurance costs of their temporary workers. The second chapter, joint work with Ithai Lurie, Nicole Maestas, and Corbin Miller, examines the distribution of Social Security Disability Insurance claims across employers and industries in the United States. The third chapter, joint work with Tal Gross and Timothy Layton, provides evidence on liquidity sensitivity in healthcare consumption and its implications for the design of health insurance for low-income beneficiaries. The fourth chapter, joint work with Edward Kong, studies the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on unemployment insurance claiming during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.