Ian Sapollnik

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in economics at MIT. Before this I was a predoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and before that I completed my undergrad at UBC. My research interests include public economics, corporate finance and household finance. I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and grew up in Vancouver, BC. In my free time you'll mostly find me riding my bike, cooking or reading a non-fiction book.

Research

Tax Policy and Business Entry

with Dustin Swonder

This paper measures the effects of state corporate and personal income tax reforms on business entry using an event study research design. We focus on reforms that do not coincide with federal tax changes, are preceded and followed by stable tax policy, and substantially change tax burdens. Corporate tax reforms cause meaningful changes in business entry: we measure a five-year elasticity of 2.7 with respect to the net-of-tax rate. This is driven primarily by large effects of tax cuts. Corporate tax cuts also reduce the predicted growth potential of entrants. We do not find strong evidence of cross-border spillovers, and find no evidence that personal income tax reforms affect business entry.

Programs

I wrote stattotex, a Stata program to automate the exporting of a calculation/statistic to a LaTeX document.