I'm an assistant professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business. I'm a macroeconomist working on public finance, development, and political economy. My research covers four themes: taxation and social insurance, state capacity in Africa, sovereign debt and global finance, and incentives and market design, from performance pay to fee mechanisms for blockchains.
Fellow, Royal Economic Society, Finance for Development Lab, AUL, and BWC
I received my PhD in economics from Northwestern University. Before that I studied mathematics at École Polytechnique and Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, after growing up in Senegal. In 2026 I received the NextGen Best African Economist Under 40 Award from the African Development Bank, The Africa Report, and Jeune Afrique, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society.
Contact
My email is an1490 [at] stern [dot] nyu [dot] edu. Department of Economics, 44 West 4th Street, 7-72, New York, NY 10012.
Conditionally accepted, Quarterly Journal of Economics. September 2026.
Raising the retirement age is a common policy response when social security schemes face fiscal pressures. We develop and estimate a dynamic life cycle model to study optimal retirement and tax policy when individuals face health shocks and income risk and make endogenous retirement decisions. The model distinguishes three channels through which health affects retirement: nonconvexities in labor supply due to health-dependent fixed costs of working, earnings reductions, and mortality risk. Labor supply nonconvexities make labor supply elasticities endogenous and reverse the standard prediction that optimal labor wedges rise with age: Labor wedges eventually decline as hours fall with worker age and poor health. Mortality risk similarly overturns the standard positive savings distortion, making it optimal to subsidize savings. We estimate the model to match US microdata and compute the constrained-efficient allocation. In the optimum, labor wedges are hump-shaped, and lower for workers in poor health; retirement consumption increases with the claiming age more steeply than does the benefits top-up under the social security delayed retirement credit; and retirement savings is increasingly subsidized with worker age and poor health. These findings support flexible retirement policies rewarding delayed retirement while accommodating heterogeneity in health rather than uniform increases in the retirement age.
(with Joshua Coven, Sebastian Golder, and Arpit Gupta)
Revise and resubmit, American Economic Review. August 2026. 2026 Yuki Arai Research Prize.
Low property taxes amplify lock-in among elderly homeowners, limiting housing access for young families. Raising them reallocates housing toward the young through two channels: capitalization into lower prices reduces required downpayments for financially constrained buyers, a form of embedded leverage, while higher tax obligations raise holding costs for older owners. In our overlapping generations model, raising California’s property taxes to Texas levels increases young homeownership while decreasing elderly homeownership. Removing step-up basis also lowers elderly homeownership, suggesting their tenure is sustained by bequest tax advantages. The tax treatment of housing shapes housing allocation across generations.
Revise and resubmit, Management Science. July 2026.
This paper develops an economic theory to explain the optimal choice of blockchain transaction fee policies, contrasting quantity controls (as in Bitcoin) and price controls (as in Ethereum). I model the blockchain as a decentralized platform where validators, possessing temporary monopoly power and facing uncertain operational costs, choose transactions under varying user demand. Price controls outperform quantity controls when demand volatility is significant, the correlation between marginal costs and demand is low, and validators hold substantial bargaining power—conditions aligning closely with Ethereum’s current structure following its proof-of-stake transition. Conversely, quantity controls are optimal when marginal costs positively correlate with demand and validators’ bargaining power is limited, conditions characteristic of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work model. To a first-order approximation, I characterize the dynamics of Ethereum’s fee policies: deviations from the block-size target decay with persistence such that adjustment faster than the inverse elasticity buys not faster convergence but oscillations and excess fee volatility. Using recent transaction data, I illustrate that Ethereum’s base fee adjusts more rapidly than optimal. Additionally, I derive bounds for block size targets to mitigate maximal extractable value (MEV) exploitation. These insights offer guidance for improving blockchain governance and optimizing fee policy design.
Conditionally accepted, Journal of International Economics. June 2026.
This paper provides the first systematic analysis of international boycotts within a neoclassical trade framework. A coalition of households maximizes its own welfare subject to keeping the welfare of a foreign country below a tolerated level. I establish a general equivalence result: equilibria with such a boycotting coalition coincide with equilibria in which atomistic, price-taking boycotters maximize utility subject to fixed expenditure budgets on each country’s goods and, equivalently, net spending budgets on each country’s factor services. Optimal boycotts (i) take the form of prohibitions on importing foreign goods unless foreign comparative advantage is sufficiently large, and (ii) lead boycotters to increase their labor supply to spend more on domestic goods when income effects outweigh substitution effects. A boycott by all domestic households is equivalent to targeted import tariffs and to a voluntary export restriction by foreign firms covering the boycotted goods, and the optimal boycott mirrors the uniform structure of optimal import tariffs; however, the effectiveness of boycotts is diminished by leakage effects from nonboycotting households. Thus, while boycotts share key similarities with conventional trade policy instruments, they introduce complexities that position them as distinct tools of geoeconomic influence.
(with Meghana Gaur, John Grigsby, and Jonathon Hazell)
Forthcoming, American Economic Review: Insights, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2026.
We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of unemployment fluctuations. Our main result is that wage cyclicality from incentives does not affect the response of unemployment to productivity shocks. The response of unemployment is the same, to a first order, in two economies: one with flexible incentive pay, and another with exogenously fixed wages. This equivalence is due to movements in effort. Under the optimal incentive contract, firms’ profits do not change when wages fall, because the effort of the worker falls too.
(with Kyle Herkenhoff, Abdoulaye Cisse, Alessandro Dell'Acqua, and Ahmadou A. Mbaye)
Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 150, March 2025, 103699.
This paper studies the welfare effects from the provision of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in a context where formal workers represent only a small proportion of the labor market and informal workers can submit fraudulent claims for UI benefits. We model these features and allow for varying degrees of enforcement and different funding sources. We then estimate the model’s key parameters by conducting a custom labor force survey in Senegal. Our findings show that the liquidity gains are large and the moral hazard response to the UI benefits among workers is relatively small: an extra dollar of UI benefits yields a consumption-equivalent gain of 60–90 cents, which exceeds comparable estimates from U.S. calibrations by a factor of three to sixteen. We then show that the welfare gains depend on the program design: UI funded through payroll taxes delivers the greatest welfare gains but becomes infeasible when there are few formal workers and high rates of fraudulent claims. On the other hand, UI funded through consumption taxes delivers lower welfare gains but remains feasible with high informality and false claims.
Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 371–402, June 2023.
Half of the jobs in the United States feature pay for performance. We derive incidence and optimum formulas for the rate of tax progressivity and the top income tax rate when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms. Our first main result is that the sensitivity of the worker’s compensation to performance is roughly invariant to tax progressivity. Second, the optimal tax schedule is strictly less progressive than in standard models that treat pretax earnings risk as exogenous. Quantitatively, the welfare cost of not accounting for performance pay when choosing tax progressivity is 0.3% of consumption.
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 42, issue 2, Summer 2026, pp. 362–376, October 2026.
Hidden public liabilities can reprice sovereign risk abruptly upon revelation. We study optimal default following such a revelation in a quantitative sovereign default model and apply the framework to Senegal’s 2024 debt audit, which revised government debt upward by 50 percentage points of GDP. The revelation enters as an exogenous upward shift in the inherited debt stock within a small open economy with long-duration debt and default costs disciplined by Senegal’s monetary union constraints. Under our baseline calibration, the corrected debt stock exceeds the model’s repayment region, implying that default would have been optimal from 2023 onward—before the audit was conducted. Since Senegal has continued to repay, we also consider a no-default calibration that matches post-revelation spread dynamics. Rationalizing repayment requires income dynamics more volatile and less persistent than historical estimates, consistent with optimism about mean reversion or gambling for redemption. This calibration places Senegal near the default boundary, where a 3 per cent adverse income shock would make restructuring optimal within a year. Both calibrations yield the same conclusion: the hidden debt revelation moved Senegal from moderate fiscal risk to acute vulnerability.
FC 2025: Proceedings of the International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, February 2026, pp. 245–262.
This paper investigates how pricing schemes can achieve efficient allocations in blockchain systems featuring multiple transaction queues under a global capacity constraint. We model a capacity-constrained blockchain where users submit transactions to different queues—each representing a submarket with unique demand characteristics—and decide to participate based on posted prices and expected delays. We find that revenue maximization tends to allocate capacity to the highest-paying queue, whereas welfare maximization generally serves all queues. Optimal relative pricing of different queues depends on factors such as market size, demand elasticity, and the balance between local and global congestion. My results have implications for the implementation of local congestion pricing for evolving blockchain architectures, including parallel transaction execution, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based systems, and multiple concurrent proposers.
FC 2024: Proceedings of the International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, February 2025, pp. 303–313.
This paper investigates the optimal transaction fee mechanisms for blockchain systems, focusing on the distinction between price-based (P) and quantity-based (Q) controls. By analyzing factors such as demand uncertainty, validator costs, cryptocurrency price fluctuations, price elasticity of demand, and levels of decentralization, we establish criteria that determine the selection of transaction fee mechanisms. We present a model framed around a Nash bargaining game, exploring how blockchain designers and validators negotiate fee structures to balance network welfare with profitability. Our findings suggest that the choice between P and Q mechanisms depends critically on the blockchain’s specific technical and economic features. The study concludes that no single mechanism suits all contexts and highlights the potential for hybrid approaches that adaptively combine features of both P and Q to meet varying demands and market conditions.
(with Radhika Goyal, Anders Jensen, David Lagakos, and Yuntian Zhao)
Submitted. October 2026.
This paper examines the role of government capacity to collect taxes in driving economic development. We first draw on a new macro-historical database to document that tax collections relative to tax administration expenditures rise sharply with GDP per capita. We then interpret this finding in a neoclassical growth model with a tax administration sector in which labor inputs are required to raise tax revenues. Countries differ in their levels of tax productivity, capturing how effectively labor is used to raise taxes, as well as their levels of productivity in creating consumption and investment goods. Governments use tax revenues to provide public capital that complements private factors in production and to make transfers. Quantitatively, our model predicts that increases in tax productivity in low-income economies can raise GDP per capita substantially more than suggested by Hulten’s theorem.
Does state legitimacy shape citizens’ resistance to state demands and, ultimately, state capacity? We study colonial Nigeria, where British rule imposed similar fiscal institutions across neighboring areas but displaced an established religious fiscal order in the former Sokoto Caliphate. Under Sokoto, Islamic law defined both citizens’ tax obligations and rulers’ authority to tax. Colonial rule replaced this fiscal order with a common regime that extended beyond the former Caliphate, where it did not displace a comparable pre-existing source of fiscal legitimacy. We assemble 47,582 tax-related colonial documents and use large language models to measure tax sentiment and formal grievances. Exploiting the former Sokoto boundary in a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find substantially greater tax resistance where colonial rule displaced Sokoto’s fiscal order. Within former Sokoto, resistance is also greater where exposure to Sokoto’s state-building and administrative institutions was stronger. The additional resistance is disproportionately associated with Muslims, partly concentrated on a tax rejected under Sokoto rule, and more likely to challenge the colonial state’s right to tax. Differences in colonial taxation, administrative capacity, enforcement, and public-goods provision do not explain the results. Our findings show that state capacity depends not only on states’ ability to administer and enforce policy, but also on whether citizens regard their demands as legitimate.
Employer market power is typically measured and analyzed under the assumption of fixed labor market boundaries, often approximated by geographic units such as commuting zones or counties. We show that this practice misses an important margin: workers broaden the geographic scope of their job search when their home market is concentrated or cyclically weak. Using over 63 million online applications to U.S. hourly jobs, we document two stylized facts. First, the spatial breadth of search is heterogeneous across workers: about one in three searches in a market either smaller or larger than a typical commuting zone. Second, search breadth is also cyclical: when local labor markets deteriorate, an increasing share of workers searches farther from home. To interpret these facts, we propose a search-and-matching model that endogenizes labor market boundaries by combining granular firms with multi-market search. Relative to a fixed-market benchmark, the model has a set of distinct predictions: first, workers in concentrated markets reallocate search effort away from them; second, re-application to large firms is dampened; third, within-firm wages fall with distance to market boundaries, and, fourth, productivity pass-through is attenuated where cross-market search is more costly. Each prediction holds in the data. Effective labor market monopsony exposure is thus jointly determined by local market structure and workers’ search-effort reallocation.
(with Bocar A. Ba, Roman G. Rivera, and Alexander Whitefield)
March 2025.
We examine how negative sentiment toward an industry shapes beliefs and behaviors, focusing on demands for racial justice after George Floyd’s murder and the prominence of the “defund the police” movement. Using a survey experiment, we find that laypeople and finance professionals predicted larger stock declines for police-affiliated firms when lacking product details, while exposure to protest narratives further reduced accuracy. In the field, mutual funds in protest-exposed areas were 20% less likely to hold police stocks, and local political support for police funding fell by 4.3 percentage points. Our findings highlight how salience drives financial and behavioral overreactions.
Cities in developing countries face growing demand for public services but raise too little tax revenue to fund them. Can local governments harness synergies between the two? We partner with The Gambia's largest urban municipality to implement six randomized interventions targeting property taxation and trash collection, a service households can access by paying a user fee. At baseline, only 34% of households pay property taxes, while public trucks collect just 30% of waste. We develop a model of households' joint decisions to pay property taxes and service fees to guide our analysis. Strong enforcement through court summons sharply increases tax compliance, while comprehensive enforcement using GIS technology has smaller but meaningful effects. A tax cut has no effect. Improving access to trash collection and providing information about the tax-service link do not increase compliance. By contrast, a reciprocity intervention that reduces user fees conditional on tax payment raises compliance by a similar magnitude to comprehensive enforcement. Tying user fees to tax payments is thus a promising way to sustain a virtuous cycle.
Redistribution through Firms: The Impact of Oil Transportation Subsidies
(with Francis Annan)
Analysis completed. Ghana. Slides available on request.
The Taxation of CouplesDiscussion of work by Felix Bierbrauer, Pierre Boyer, Andreas Peichl, and Daniel Weishaar. National Tax Association Meetings, 2020.
Inverse December FeverDiscussion of work by Zareh Asatryan, Andreas Peichl, Thomas Schwab, and Johannes Voget. National Tax Association Meetings, 2017.