Jeff Levy

Jeff Levy

Economist and lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Research

Causal Effects of Uncertainty: Evidence from Military Base Realignment and Closures

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Working paper pending.

Presentations:
5th Biennial Conference, Padua, Italy (September 21st 2023): Uncertainty, Economic Activity, and Forecasting in a Changing Environment link
SITE 2023, Stanford University (September 8th 2023): The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility link

Recommended citation: Levy, Jeffrey A., Gabriel P. Mathy, and Xuguang Simon Sheng. Causal Effects of Uncertainty: Evidence from Military Base Realignment and Closures (2023)

State-level Economic Policy Uncertainty

Published: Journal of Monetary Economics, 2022

We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (EPU-S), one that captures national and international sources (EPU-N), and a composite index that captures both. EPU-S rises around gubernatorial elections and own-state episodes like the California electricity crisis of 2000–01 and the Kansas tax experiment of 2012. EPU-N rises around presidential elections and in response to 9–11, Gulf Wars I and II, the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, the 2012 fiscal cliff episode, and federal government shutdowns. Close elections elevate policy uncertainty much more than the average election. VAR models fit to pre-COVID data imply that upward shocks to own-state EPU foreshadow weaker economic performance in the state, as do upward EPU shocks in contiguous states. The COVID-19 pandemic drove huge increases in policy uncertainty and unemployment, more so in states with stricter government-mandated lockdowns.

Press: Vox EU

Recommended citation: Baker, Scott R., Steven J. Davis, and Jeffrey A. Levy. "State-level economic policy uncertainty." Journal of Monetary Economics 132 (2022): 81-99 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2022.08.004

Parole Officer Text Messages

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Metro Policy Center at the Urban Institute: A project studying a proprietary dataset of text messages between parole officers and parolees.

Education Data

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Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute: Using Python to seamlessly maintain a network of datasets across Stata, SQL and S3 formats.

DC Courts Web Scraping

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Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute: Responsibly automating millions of connections to the DC Courts website in order to retrieve and parse public data.

National Center for Charitable Statistics IRS Core Files

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Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute: Converting an outdated process of mixed manual and SQL code into a seamless 4,000-line Python script, in order to build the NCCS IRS Core Files.

Spark for Social Science

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Research Programming at the Urban Institute: The platform, tools, and lessons to help bridge the gap between social science researchers and the big data methods used in data science.

Contract Enforcement and Group Formation

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PhD research at American University, building an agent based model in Python to simulate the contract enforcement problem of the Maghribi Traders, as modeled in the game theory work of Grief 2006.