Brian Wheaton is a PhD candidate in the PEG Program within the Economics Department at Harvard University. His research interests include Political Economy, Cultural Economics, Macroeconomics, Public Economics, and Applied Econometrics. Broadly speaking, Brian aims to use empirical data in order to answer policy-relevant real-world political and economic questions.
Brian's job market paper focuses on the effects of laws on beliefs held by the public, finding that virtually every major US social policy law of the past half-century has induced significant backlash. Some of his other projects explore the effects of school corporal punishment on long-run cultural and economic outcomes, the macroeconomic effects of the Eastern European flat-tax reforms, and the implications of minimum wages for monetary policy efficacy.
