My research uses econometric modelling and large administrative datasets to inform the development of government policy. Much of my work focuses on the design of the tax and transfer system: how to tax capital and businesses, how to treat goods that create externalities, and how to support households in the face of economic shocks.
I am a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where I worked for ten years before joining LSE, and a CEPR Research Affiliate. I received my PhD from University College London in 2022 and hold a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.
April 2026LSE announces the new Stone Centre for the Study of Wealth Inequality and Entrepreneurship, which will be co-directed by Camille Landais and me.
with Helen Miller. Revise and resubmit, Journal of Political Economy, 2026.
We develop a dynamic model of business owner-managership to study the equity and efficiency effects of capital tax reforms. We model owner-managers’ choices in a rich tax environment, allowing for both real and shifting responses to tax. Increasing all capital tax rates by the same amount raises revenue progressively but comes at an efficiency cost. However, this ignores tax rate differentials and holds the tax base fixed—we show that relaxing these assumptions reveals the existence of implementable reforms that boost equity and efficiency. First, reducing the differentials between the tax rates on different types of capital return lowers income shifting and the associated distortions to the intertemporal allocation of resources. Second, further efficiency gains are achieved by reforming the tax base, which allows the policymaker to raise revenue from taxing inframarginal investments, while not discouraging marginal investments.
Aggregate price shocks can lead to significant inequality in losses both across and within income groups. This creates a trade-off between supporting households through subsidies, which target those most affected but introduce inefficiencies, and transfers, which are less distortionary but harder to target precisely. We develop a framework to quantify this trade-off, using rich panel data on energy spending and income, alongside price and policy variation from the 2022-23 European Energy Crisis. We show that, in the absence of policy intervention, average household welfare losses would have been equivalent to 6% of income, with some households facing much larger losses. A combination of an energy price subsidy and universal transfers reduced both the mean and dispersion of household losses but incurred efficiency costs equivalent to 12% of the total funds spent on the relief package. Under a range of social preferences, better targeted transfers would have reduced the optimal subsidy rate, though not eliminated it entirely.
