Jacob Goldin

Jacob Goldin is the Richard M. Lipton professor of tax law at the University of Chicago Law School and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. Trained as a lawyer and economist, Goldin focuses on US tax administration and how tax policy affects low-income households. Goldin previously worked in the Office of Tax Policy at the US Treasury Department and was a professor of law at Stanford Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. He holds a JD from Yale Law School and a PhD in economics from Princeton University.

Laura Kawano

Laura Kawano is a nonresident fellow with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and research affiliate with the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on using administrative data to understand how individuals and firms respond to tax policies. She also examines the effects of financial aid for higher education, unemployment insurance benefits, and natural disasters. Her work has been published in several scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and Journal of Public Economics.

Before joining the Office of Tax Policy Research, Kawano was an economist at the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis and a visiting professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She serves as the Forum Editor at the National Tax Journal and as the treasurer for the National Tax Association. Kawano holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

Day Manoli

Day Manoli is a nonresident fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on empirical analyses to document and improve the impacts of government policies. Manoli’s research interests include Social Security and retirement policy, income tax policy, and education policy, and he works with private companies and government agencies to analyze data, test economic models, and implement large-scale field experiments.

Adam Looney

Adam Looney is a visiting fellow at Brookings, where he was previously the Joseph A. Pechman senior fellow in Economic Studies. He is also affiliated with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Mr. Looney is an expert on U.S. tax policy. Mr. Looney is now the Executive Director of the Marriner S. Eccles Institute at the University of Utah.

Mr. Looney returned to Brookings in March 2017 after three years of service in the U.S. Treasury Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis. At Treasury, Mr. Looney advised the Secretary on economic issues related to tax policy, analyzed current and proposed legislation, and provided the official receipts forecasts and revenue estimates for the Administration’s budgets. He also studied, among several issues, the causes and consequences of student loan distress and the economic returns to postsecondary education and played an instrumental role in the advancement of several data-intensive projects including the production of the Department of Education’s College Scorecard.

Prior to joining the Treasury, Mr. Looney was policy director of The Hamilton Project and was a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings from 2010-2013. Previously, he served as the senior economist for public finance and tax policy with President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board. He received a PhD in economics from Harvard University and a BA in economics from Dartmouth College.

Elena Patel

Elena Patel is a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy center and the Sorenson Assistant Professor in the Division of Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. 

Patel’s work explores how policy—for example, tax structure and government programs—affect firms’ critical assets: capital and labor. Prior to joining the University of Utah, Patel gained broad professional experience in the federal government, including positions in the White House at the Council of Economic Advisors, in the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, in the Office of Accountability and Compliance at the Postal Regulatory Commission, in the Macroeconomic Analysis Division at the Congressional Budget Office, and in the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 2007, Patel earned a Bachelor of Science with Distinction in Economics (with Honors) and Mathematics, with a minor in Modern Greek Studies from the University of Michigan. In 2008, she earned a Master of Arts in Economics in 2008, and in 2013, a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Michigan. 

Bob Weinberger

Robert A. Weinberger is a nonresident fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. His research focuses on tax administration, practitioner regulation, and refundable tax credits. Prior to joining TPC, he spent eight years as a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program. Weinberger was an executive at H&R Block, Unilever, and Continental Bank. Earlier in his career he served in state government as general counsel to the Illinois state comptroller, and in federal government at the Departments of Commerce and Transportation and at the White House. Weinberger is emeritus board chair of the Center for Responsive Politics, a past board member of the National Tax Association, and a past member of the IRS Advisory Council and the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Investment. Weinberger has a bachelor’s degree in government from Oberlin College and a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law. He was a fellow at the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs and studied at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.