Jacob Bastian

Jacob Bastian is a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and assistant professor of economics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Prior to joining Rutgers, he completed a two-year postdoc at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Michigan. Bastian’s research focuses on how public policy can reduce poverty, increase economic opportunity, and affect social attitudes, while also identifying unintended consequences. Specifically, his research has looked at the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and finds that this program helped lead to the rise of working mothers in the 1970s, improved the education and employment outcomes of children of EITC recipients, changed social attitudes about the role of women in society, and had positive effects on marriage and fertility. In new work, he shows that the EITC helps “pay for itself” by increasing various forms of tax revenue and by decreasing reliance on other forms of public assistance. Bastian presented this research at the 2019 NBER spring public economics meeting and he received a 2018–2020 grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation to  continue research on the EITC. His dissertation was chosen as a  winner of the 2017 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertations in Government Finance and Taxation by the National Tax Association.