Leadership

Joshua Rauh

Program Director - Fiscal Policy Initiative

Program Director - State & Local Governance Initiative

George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics

Ormond Family Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Joshua Rauh is the Ormond Family Professor of Finance at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution. He leads the Hoover Institution’s Fiscal Policy Initiative and the Hoover Institution State and Local Governance Initiative. He formerly served at the White House where he was principal chief economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2019-20), and taught at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business (2004–9) and the Kellogg School of Management (2009–12). At the Hoover Institution he has served as Director of Research (2018-19). He has testified before House, Joint, and Joint Select Committees of the United States Congress, and he is a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office.

His research focuses on government liabilities, corporate and individual taxation, and institutional investing. His work has received media coverage in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Economist. He has received various awards recognizing his scholarship including the Brattle Prize and the Smith Breeden Prize of the American Finance Association. His scholarly papers have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Public Economics. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He has published numerous op-eds in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and The National Review online. His PragerU videos on public pensions, the role of government, and taxation and inequality have together been viewed over 10 million times. He is the founder of the Liberty Lens Economics Substack.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Rauh was an associate economist at Goldman Sachs in London. He received a BA from Yale University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in economics.

Fiscal Policy Initiative

Benjamin Jaros

Research Fellow

Benjamin Jaros is an economist and research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in public finance, financial economics, and economic history, with a focus on federal, state, and local taxation. His recent research examines wealth taxation, budget scoring, taxpayer behavioral responses to income tax changes, state corporate income tax apportionment formula reforms, and colonial-era tobacco tariffs. He produces revenue estimates and fiscal impact analyses of state and federal tax policy.

His research and commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and RealClearPolitics. He has previously worked at the Tax Foundation and served as a research assistant in academic, policy, and private-sector settings. Jaros received his BS in economics, magna cum laude, from Seton Hall University and his MA and PhD in economics from Clemson University.

Tom Church

Policy Fellow

Tom Church is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. He studies health care policy, entitlement reform, income inequality, poverty, and the federal budget.

Church’s research interests include tax-advantaged savings accounts for health care, the fiscal effects of a federal public option, state-based regulatory reform, pro-growth federal tax policy, and the distributional effects of entitlement spending reform.

He has researched the fiscal effects of major health care proposals and is a co-author of Choices for All, a set of common-sense health care reforms. He contributes to Hoover’s Healthcare Policy Working Group, the Fiscal Policy Initiative, and the Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy.

Church received his master’s degree in public policy with honors from Pepperdine University, specializing in economics and international relations. He has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and political science from the University of Michigan.

John Doran

Research Analyst

John Doran is a research analyst for the Hoover Institution’s Fiscal Policy Initiative. His research interests include public finance, financial economics, and monetary economics. John graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Connecticut with a BA in economics with a minor in analytics.