PWBM Experts
27 experts
Aidan O'Connell
Associate Analyst
Aidan graduated from the College of William & Mary with a BA in public policy and economics in 2022. At PWBM, he advances data and estimation efforts in the population microsimulation model. His work aims to improve life cycle projections of earnings, wealth accumulation, and educational attainment.
Alexander Arnon
Director of Policy Analysis
Alexander Arnon leads much of PWBM's applied policy analysis work, with primary responsibility for microsimulation modeling and conventional budget scoring. His work spans a wide range of policy areas—including tax policy, immigration, demographics, labor markets, and major fiscal legislation—and focuses on producing timely, rigorous estimates of how policy changes affect the federal budget and U.S. economy.
Brendan Novak
Senior Policy Analyst
Brendan Novak is a researcher and policy analyst interested in the intersection of data science, economics, and public policy. At PWBM he serves as a model developer and policy analyst focused on tax microsimulation, data generation, and distributional analysis of U.S. fiscal policy.
Cate Taylor
Nonresident Fellow
Cate comes to the Penn Wharton Budget Model with a background in public policy, innovation, and corporate impact. Before joining Penn, she was a Fortune 500 executive, an entrepreneur, and she served as the National Security Council’s Director for International Finance Policy. Her research focuses on the economic and societal efficacy of enterprises’ Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives and the relationship between enterprises’ impact initiatives and public policy.
Duncan Haystead
Associate Analyst
Duncan Haystead graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in mathematics. He works on the microsim side of the PWBM model.
Ed Murphy
Senior Policy Analyst
Ed Murphy is a policy expert whose work focuses on analyzing developments in federal fiscal policy. At PWBM, he is responsible for producing models of federal spending and contributing to analyses of policy proposals. Prior to joining PWBM, he spent seven years with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, where he created blogs, analyses, and graphics that summarized fiscal and economic policy issues for a general audience, and also managed a portfolio of grants to think tanks working on fiscal and economic policy research. He holds a Master of Public Policy with a concentration in public budgeting and finance from the Edward J. Bloustein School at Rutgers University.
Felix Reichling
Senior Economist
Felix Reichling joined the Penn Wharton Budget Model with a background in public policy analysis and macroeconomic research. He previously served as Chief of the Fiscal Policy Analysis Unit in the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) Macroeconomic Analysis Division. In that role, he led a team of economists in model development and research regarding the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, including dynamic scoring. Before joining the CBO, he worked as an economic consultant. At PWBM, Felix focuses on healthcare, immigration, and OLG model development.
Germán Sánchez Sánchez
OLG Model Engineer
Germán Sánchez Sánchez is an economist whose research interests lie at the intersection of macroeconomics, finance, and real estate. His prior research focused on developing quantitative models of housing and mortgage markets, with particular emphasis on understanding the effects of policy interventions on these markets, as well as their implications for financial stability and welfare.
Grace Sam
Assistant Analyst
Grace joins Penn Wharton Budget Model with a background in economics, data science, and public policy. She holds an M.S. in Data Analytics and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.A. in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. Her research and professional interests lie at the intersection of data, economics, and social impact, with a focus on using machine learning and statistical modeling to inform public policy.
Jennifer Branscom
Program Manager
Jennifer Branscom is Program Manager at Penn Wharton Budget Model where she is involved in the design and delivery of programs, communications, and events that support PWBM's mission to provide accurate, accessible, and transparent economic analysis of public policy. She manages the Wharton Public Policy Certificate Program, which is designed for Congressional staffers and other public policy professionals seeking to strengthen their understanding of the economics of public policy.
Jesús Villero
Applied Microeconomist
Jesús Villero is an economist with research interests spanning labor, public, and development economics. His work focuses on education policy, labor market dynamics, and economic demography. At PWBM, Jesús provides technical support to the microsimulation and policy analysis teams, contributing expertise in causal inference and applied economics research.
Jinjing Yang
Research Data Analyst
At PWBM, Jinjing leads the development of an automated framework for integrating and maintaining complex economic models, including the microsimulation model, economic projections, the tax simulator, the OASI calculator, other budget projections and the OLG model. Her work focuses on streamlining model execution, validating inputs and outputs, improving cross platform reliability, and supporting scalable, maintainable policy analysis.
Jon Huntley
Senior Economist
Before joining Penn Wharton Budget Model, Jon was part of the Fiscal Studies Unit at the Congressional Budget Office and specialized in building models to analyze the effects of changes in fiscal policy on the economy. Jon’s academic research focuses on household finance and how household savings and consumption decisions are affected by economic frictions. His research on how tax-deferred retirement savings accounts encourage households to spend out of anticipated changes to income such as tax rebates has been published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Jon received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University and his B.S. in mathematics and economics from Duke University.
Jonathan Halket
Senior Economist
Jonathan Halket researches the intersection of finance, the built environment, economic inequality, urban spaces and macroeconomics. Before joining PWBM, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at Texas A&M University and a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Economics at the University of Essex. He is a co-founder of the HUD Center of Excellence for Hispanic Housing Studies at Texas A&M and an International Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Junghoon Lee
Director of Engineering and Data
Junghoon is interested in building data-driven software, such as the code for various models that PWBM owns. Such software poses a unique challenge: domain experts usually lack the skills to maintain complex software, and software engineers struggle to understand the domain. He wants to build a team/organization that can design, improve, and maintain such software for an extended period.
Lysle Boller
Applied Microeconomist
Lysle Boller is an economist with expertise in international corporate taxation. His research interests lie at the intersection of public economics and industrial organization, with a focus on how firms respond to incentives created by the global tax system. Prior to joining PWBM, Lysle worked as a researcher at the Yale School of Management and as an economic consultant for Compass Lexecon.
Mariko Paulson
Senior Front End Developer
As a Senior Application Developer, Mari helps economists and analysts build programs to calculate and visualize results. Her current work focuses mainly on Social Security and past projects have included data interactives. She has worn a variety of hats at PWBM over the years including administrative, communications, and front-end.
Patrick Murphy
Nonresidential Fellow
The Honorable Patrick J. Murphy is a Nonresidential Fellow at the Penn Wharton Budget Model Office. An entrepreneur who leads the geopolitical unit at Hilco Global, he is an historic enterprise-level leader. While serving as acting Secretary of the Army and America’s first Iraq War Veteran elected to the US Congress, he served on the Appropriations Committee and authored bipartisan legislation into law that cut fraud, waste and abuse in Congress via the Improve Act and Improper Payments Act that’s saved tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. In the Pentagon, Secretary Murphy expanded the Soldier for Life initiative, generating over $250 million in public-private partnerships while bringing in over 120K Gen Z troops into the Army. To better connect the Pentagon to 19+ million American veterans, he opened online sales to drive revenue beyond the 2,500 Army & Air Force Exchange Service retail stores, increasing annual sales to over $6.7 billion. The Army is a Fortune 2-sized organization with over 1.3 million members and an annual budget of over $185 billion. He has been the distinguished chair of innovation at the United States Military Academy at West Point, visiting fellow at the University of Chicago, and lectures at the US Army War College.
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Seul Ki (Sophie) Shin
Senior Economist
Sophie Shin is a Senior Economist at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, where she leads analysis of Social Security policy and long-term program finances. She joined PWBM in 2015 after earning her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Simon Palenchar
Senior Application Developer
Simon works on the infrastructure and application systems that support PWBM's research and modeling workflows. His current responsibilities focus on DevOps and platform engineering, including maintaining compute environments, automating workflows, supporting cloud and HPC systems, and helping teams deploy and operate applications reliably.
Susan Guthrie
Managing Director
Prior to joining PWBM Susan held leadership roles in the management consulting, tech, and non-profit sectors. She received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University and her BA from the University of California at San Diego.
Vidisha Chowdhury
Data Analyst
Vidisha specializes in the intersection of machine learning, economic modeling, and public policy. At PWBM, she focuses on the demographic components of the organization's microsimulation framework, with specific expertise in immigration policy and natality forecasting. Her recent research examines the implications of AI adoption for work and the economic impacts of U.S. visa policy changes.
Wanling Luo
Data Analyst
Wanling (Lorraine) Luo is a Data Analyst at the PWBM. Her work focuses on business taxation, tariff modeling, and international tax, with an emphasis on translating fast-moving policy changes into scalable simulation tools and transparent, reusable analytical workflows.
Xiaoyue Sun
Senior Data Analyst
At PWBM, Xiaoyue Sun works on corporate tax modeling and business investment analysis. Her work includes developing core components of PWBM's corporate tax simulator, including models of depreciation, amortization, and net operating losses, as well as constructing firm- and asset-level investment profiles using IRS Statistics of Income, BEA fixed asset data, and financial statements.
Youran Wu
Senior Data Analyst
Youran joins Penn Wharton Budget Model as a recent graduate from Columbia University with a master’s degree in Economics. She has a sound theoretical grounding and practical experience in the fields of development economics and public finance. Her research interest includes macroeconomics research and policy analysis, with a focus on development and labor.
Yueyao Zhang
Quality Assurance Engineer
Yueyao works on the core software and data infrastructure behind large-scale policy simulation, with a focus on the tax simulator, Social Security modeling, and the OLG Interfaces model.
Yunye Jiang
Senior Application Developer
Yunye Jiang is a Senior Application Developer with a background in quantitative finance. Prior to joining Penn Wharton Budget Model, He worked as a quantitative analyst in private equity. His work there consisted of collecting data, establishing databases and building models to determine effective trading strategies, as well as conducting operable judgment. Yunye earned his M.A.in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science from the University of Pennsylvania. His academic research focuses on the predictability of futures prices and the cause-effect relationship between stock and forex markets.