Kelsey Pukelis

I am a Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I am an empirical public economist, with secondary fields in labor and behavioral economics. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the social safety net and work. My current research focuses on the Supplemental Nutrition Assitance Program (SNAP): the largest nutrition assistance program in the U.S. I have studied the impact of work requirements on employment and earnings, and I am currently studying the effects of drastic administrative changes to SNAP since the COVID-19 pandemic and the nature of stigma associated with the program. I primarily apply quasi-experimental methods to publicly available and administrative data. More broadly, I am also interested in applied econometric methods and the effect of social norms and pressures on individual behavior. By acquiring deep contextual knowledge and applying insights from other social sciences into economics, my goal is to deepen our understanding of the consequences of policy design choices in part by incorporating the perspective of individuals who are affected by them.

I am a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration in Harvard University's Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy and an awardee of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program. During the summer of 2020, I worked as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research New England. Prior to graduate school, I was a Research Specialist Intermediate at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. In 2017, I earned a B.A. with honors in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, Economics, and Mathematics from Northwestern University.