Danny Yagan

Research Expertise and Interest

taxes and investment, income inequality, employment in recessions

Research Description

Danny Yagan is an Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Associate Director of the Berkeley Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and Faculty Co-Director of the Taxation and Inequality Initiative of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. In 2018 he was awarded a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship for early-career contributions. His work has been supported by the Sloan Foundation, Arnold Foundation, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and centers at Berkeley, UC Davis, Rutgers, and Harvard. He joined the department after earning a BA summa cum laude and a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
February 24, 2020

Fighting Income Segregation in Higher Education

Inside Higher Ed
Scott Jaschik
As long as most colleges employ SAT or ACT test scores as key measures for admission, it will be difficult for them to attract more low-income students, suggests a new working paper co-authored by economics professors Emmanuel Saez and Danny Yagan for the National Bureau of Economic Research. That's because wealthier students tend to perform better on the tests. A solution, they propose, would be to give students from middle- and low-income families a "bonus" of 64 to 160 points on the SAT test. Link to the paper at OpportunityInsights.org.
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February 12, 2020

A Simple Way to Equalize the Ivies? Give Others the Legacy SAT Bonus

New York Times
Dana Goldstein and Anemona Hartocollis
Simply giving middle-class and low-income students an SAT "bonus" of 64 to 160 points -- essentially equaling the advantage seen in legacy admissions at selective colleges -- would significantly reduce socio-economic segregation in higher education, concludes a new study, co-authored by economics professors Emmanuel Saez and Danny Yagan. The study found, among other things, that three-quarters of affluent students with a 1080 SAT score attended one of the 976 selective colleges studied, compared to half of the students from the lowest income bracket with the same score.
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