Laura Kawano is a nonresident fellow with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a research affiliate with the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on using administrative data to understand how individuals and firms respond to tax policies. She also examines the effects of financial aid for higher education, unemployment insurance benefits, and natural disasters. Her work has been published in several scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and Journal of Public Economics.

Before joining the Office of Tax Policy Research, Kawano was an economist at the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis and a visiting professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She serves as the Forum Editor at the National Tax Journal and as the treasurer for the National Tax Association. Kawano holds a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.