Research email: nathan.seegert@gmail.com
Academic email: nathan.seegert@utah.edu
Bio

Nathan Seegert collaborates with policymakers and businesses to further our understanding of the economy. He co-founded the Utah Consumer and Business Economic Surveys, the Banking, Entrepreneurship, Regulations, and Taxes Study, and the Utah Tax Invitational. He currently is working with the Forecasting and Sureveillance of Infectious Threats and Epidemics (ForeSITE) center on a $17.5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and previously worked on Utah's Health and Economic Recovery Outreach (HERO) Project. His work has been published in top academic journals such as The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Journal of Finance, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Public Economics. It has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Harvard Business Review, CBS Moneywatch, Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Atlantic. Nathan currently teaches microeconomics at the University of Utah as an associate professor (with tenure) in the finance department (university website). He is a member of the Utah Governor's Economic Council, an Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center Research Fellow, a Faculty Advisor for the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, partners with Texas AM Geoservices, and is a David Eccles Faculty Fellow.

What I am excited about right now

I am currently presenting several new papers
"Asymmetric Risk of Housing Distress from Property Tax Limitations" with Sebastien Bradley and Da Huang,
"Implicit Land Taxes and Their Effect on the Real Economy" with Daniel Murphy,
"Do Personal Taxes Drive Unrelated Mergers and Acquisitions?" with Jeffrey Coles, Jason Sandvik, and Aazam Virani and
"The Real Effects of Banking and Capital Flows" with Elizabeth Berger and Maclean Gaulin.

Published and Accepted Papers


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Half Banked: The Economic Impact of Cash Management in the Marijuana Industry
with Elizabeth Berger

Accepted, Journal of Finance.

This paper estimates the benefits of the cash management service banks provide using variation in the marijuana industry

       

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Workplace Knowledge Flows
With Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma , and Chris Stanton

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 135, Issue 3, August 2020, pp. 1635--1680.

Through a field experiment within a firm, we show that frictions to knowledge flows can be reduced with managerial interventions and increases in knoweldge flows led to substantial productivity gains during and after the study period.

       

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Bunching Designs: A Guide to Practice
with Marinho Bertanha, Carolina Caetano and Hugo Jales

Conditionally Accepted, Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics.

We review the recent developments in the bunching literature, both when bunching is presented in the outcome variable and when it is presented in the treatment variable.



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Better Bunching, Nicer Notching
with Marinho Bertanha and Andrew McCallum

Accepted, Journal of Econometrics.

We develop a consistent bunching estimator that is easy to implement.

      Slides       Supplemental Appendix               Code

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What is the Active Prevalence of COVID-19?
With Mu-Jeung Yang, Marinho Bertanha, Maclean Gaulin, Adam Looney, Brian Orleans, Andrew T. Pavia, Kristina Stratford, Matthew Samore, and Stephen C Alder

Review of Economics and Statistics Accepted

We provide a method to track the active prevalence of COVID-19 in real time, correcting for time-varying sample selection in symptom-based testing data and incomplete tracking of recovered cases and fatalities.

       

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General Business Credits: Estimating the Impact of a Regime Change in Mandatory Tax Disclosure
Journal of Public Economics, Accepted With Laura Konda and Elena Patel

We quantify the intended and unintended consequences of increasing information disclosure by firms due to the redesign of IRS Form 3800.

       

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The Optimal Distribution of Population Across Cities
With David Albouy , Kristian Behrens , and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

Journal of Urban Economics, Volume 110, March 2019, pp. 102--113.

We develop an urban model that incorporates: (1) heterogeneous sites; (2) fiscal and urban wedges; and (3) an endogenous number of cities, i.e., the extensive margin of urban development.

       

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Taxation and Inequality: Active versus Passive Channels
with Estelle Dauchy and Francisco Navarro-Sanchez

Review of Economic Dynamics, Volume 42, October 2021, Pages 156--177.

We decompose the ability of the income tax to insure household consumption against income shocks into active and passive changes from 1970--2010.

       

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Does Market Power Encourage or Discourage Investment? Evidence from the Hospital Market?
with Elena Patel

Journal of Law and Economics, Volume 63, Issue 4, November 2020.

Market power distorts tax incentives such that tax incentives in concentrated markets provide larger stimuli than in competitive markets.

       

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The Impact of Investor-Level Taxation on Mergers and Acquisitions
with Eric Ohrn

Journal of Public Economics. Volume 177, September 2019, 104038.

We show that dividend taxes distort merger and acquisition behavior despite not distorting other investment decisions.

       

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How Do Firms Respond to Corporate Taxes?
with Jeff Coles, Elena Patel, and Matt Smith

Journal of Accounting Research Volume 60, Issue 3 June 2022, Pages 965--1006.

We demonstrate firms respond more the corporate taxes than previously thought, that there is heterogeneity across firms, and the firms engage in both real and reporting responses.

       

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Bunching Estimation of Elasticities Using Stata
with Marinho Bertanha and Andrew McCallum and Alexis Payne
The Stata Journal, Accepted.

This article introduces the Stata command bunching, which implements new non-parametric and semi-parametric identification methods for estimating elasticity developed in Bertanha, McCallum, Seegert (2022).

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Employee Responses to Compensation Reductions: Evidence from a Sales Firm
With Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma , and Chris Stanton

Management Science, Volume 67, Issue 12, December 2021, Pages 7291-7950.

We use staggered commission reductions at a sales firm to estimate effects on worker turnover and effort.

       

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Probability-Based Estimates of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Seroprevalence and Detection Fraction, Utah, USA
With Matthew Samore, Adam Looney, Brian Orleans, Tom Greene, Julio C Delgado, Angela Presson, Chong Zhang, Jian Ying, Yue Zhang, Jincheng Shen, Patricia Slev, Maclean Gaulin, Mu-Jeung Yang , Andrew T. Pavia, Stephen C Alder
Emerging Infectious Diseases, Volume 27 Number 11, 2021, Pages 2786.

This project's aim was to generate an unbiased estimate of the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in four urban counties in Utah.



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High variability in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 within households and implications for control
With Damon J. A. Toth, Alexander B. Beams, Lindsay T. Keegan, Yue Zhang, Tom Greene, Biran Orleans, Adam Looney, Stephen C. Alder, Matthew H. Samore
Plos one, Volume 16 Number 11, 2021, e0259097.



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Should Congestion Tolls Be Set by the Government or by the Private Sector? The Knight-Pigou Debate Revisited
With Stephen Salant

Economica Volume 85, Issue 339, July 2018, pp. 428--448.

We clarify that congestion externalities cannot be solved by the private sector alone and propose a new role for government and private sector that achieves the efficient outcome.

       

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The Performance of State Tax Portfolios During and After the Great Recession

National Tax Journal, December 2015, Volume 68, Issue 4, pp. 901-918

State tax revenues continue, since the Great Recession, to experience elevated volatility relative to previous decades.

       

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Marijuana Taxation and Imperfect Competition
With Chris Mace and Elena Patel

National Tax Journal, Volume 73, Issue 2, June 2020, pp. 545--592.

We find consumers pay more of the marijuana tax than producers and that this is primarily due to the market being imperfectly competitive.

       

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The COVID-19 State Sales Tax Windfall
with Phil Dean, Maclean Gaulin and Mu-Jeung Yang

Accepted, International Tax and Public Finance.

We show state sales tax revenues were higher than expected and shifted away from urban areas and toward rural areas.

       

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Incomplete Program Take-Up During a Crisis: Evidence from The COVID-19 Shock in Utah
With Marianne Bitler, Jason Cook, and Danea Horn.
International Tax and Public Finance, Accepted.

We explore the response of the safety net to COVID-19 using newly-collected survey data.



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Revisions Requested


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Rushing to Opportunity: Gentrification, Entrepreneurship, and City Growth
With Kristian Behrens

Revisions requested, Journal of Urban Economics.

We consider a new tradeoff between new opportunities and established agglomeration benefits that help explains several stylized facts including rushes, entrepreneurship clustering, and city growth patterns.

       

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What Drives the Effectiveness of Social Distancing in Combating COVID-19 across U.S. States?
With Mu-Jeung Yang, Maclean Gaulin, and Adam Looney

Revisions requested, PLOS One.


We show that the quality of information matters for how people respond to information about COVID-19.

       

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Working Papers


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Should Workplace Programs be Voluntary or Mandatory? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Mentorship
With Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma , and Chris Stanton

We run an RCT to investigate whether workplace programs should be mandatory or voluntary.

       

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Why is Entrepreneurial Overconfidence (So) Persistent? Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment
With Mu-Jeung Yang and Maclean Gaulin

We run two field experiments across 1,000 firms to explore the role of hindsight bias and causal misattribution in explaining overconfidence of entrepreneurs.

       

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Is the Low Income Housing Tax Credit an Effective Policy for Increasing Neighborhood Income Diversity?
With Therese J. McGuire

We show neighborhoods that received more Low Income Housing Tax Credits experienced a decrease in income diversity and this is due to crowding out the lowest-income households in the neighborhood.

       

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Optimal Tax Policy Under Uncertainty Over Tax Revenue

This paper develops a volatility index that captures the mean-volatility tradeoff.

       

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Tax Revenue Volatility

Between 2000 and 2014 U.S. state tax revenue volatility increased to 10.8% of revenues, up from 2.9% in the previous three decades and tax policy changes explain 59% of this increase.

       

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The Homophily Trap: Evidence from Open Source Software
with Davidson Heath and Jeffrey Yang.

We find that open source software teams suffer from a homophily trap decreasing efficiency.

       

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Information Revelation of Decentralized Crisis Management: Evidence from Natural Experiments on Mask Mandates
With Maclean Gaulin, Mu-Jeung Yang, and Francisco Navarro-Sanchez

Mask mandates reduce confirmed cases and can increase economic activity---if they are enforced at a state rather than county level.

        Summary        

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The Elasticity of Taxable Income Across Countries
With Claudio Agostini, Marinho Bertanha, Govindadeva Bernier, Katarzyna Bilicka, Jaroslav Bukovina, Yuxuan He, Evangelos Koumanakos, Tomas Lichard, Jan Palguta, Elena Patel, Louis Perrault, Kristina Strohmaier, Maximilian Todtenhaupt, and Branislav Zudel.

We provide estimates of the corporate elasticity of taxable income across countries.

       

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Asymmetric Risk of Housing Distress from Property Tax Limitations
with Sebastien Bradley and Da Huang

We price property tax risk to households and find higher risk leads to more housing distress.

       

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Idiosyncratic Land Taxes and Their Effect on the Real Economy
with Daniel Murphy.

We show that land taxes are associated with higher density, neighborhood diversity, business formation, and other indicators of economic performance.

       

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Doing Good Rather Than Doing Well: What Stimulates Personal Data Sharing and Why?
With Maclean Gaulin and Mu-Jeung Yang (available upon request)

Personal data sharing can be motivated through incentives or different instrinsic motivations. We consider these effects in the context of getting tested of COVID-19.

       

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