Assist. Prof. Adam Lavecchia

The Effects of Income Taxes on the Economic Outcomes of Immigrants

During his visit to CES, Adam Lavecchia will be working on projects that document the effects of income taxes on the economic outcomes of immigrants. In one project, joint with Michael Smart and Alisa Tazhitdinova, he is estimating how immigrants to Canada learn about the labor income tax system. In this project, knowledge about tax rules is proxied by the amount of sharp bunching by immigrants at a large and salient kink in the tax schedule. Differences in bunching amount sub-populations and over time are used to estimate how immigrants learn about labor income taxes. In another project (joint with Alisa Tazhitdinova and Robert McKercher), the authors using variation in average labor income tax rates in Canadian provinces from 1982–2019 to estimate the effect of income taxes on inter-provincial immigration flows. During his visit, Mr. Lavecchia will deliver three CES Lectures entitled “Labor Supply, Saving and Individual Income Taxation.”

Mr. Lavecchia is an empirical microeconomist with research interests at the intersection of public economics and labor economics. His research aims to achieve two objectives. The first is to document the causal effect of tax and transfer policies and educational interventions on the economic outcomes of individuals and families. To do so, Mr. Lavecchia uses natural experiments generated by policy changes that differentially affect groups of individuals or families as well as microdata to estimate causal effects. The second objective of his research is to use the estimates of causal effects and economic theory to inform policy debates.

Adam Lavecchia is an Assistant Professor of Economics at McMaster University and is a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) in Bonn. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto in 2017. Mr. Lavecchia’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Review: Insights, the National Tax Journal and the Canadian Journal of Economics.