René Livas

René Livas is a Doctoral Candidate in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. An applied urban economist, his work keys in on three questions that local policymakers in care about:    1. What are the costs and benefits of taxing income locally, and how large should these taxes be? 2. How does rapid transit change the composition of economic activity in a city?  3. Labor market shocks are inevitable. What can local government do about them?   With generous funding from the Reimagining the Economy Program, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, René blends the digitization of historical data with modern econometric and quantitative methods to provide some answers to these questions.   Before Harvard, René was a predoctoral fellow at MIT. He holds an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale University and earned his BA in Economics from Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, with highest honors. He has also worked as an analyst at the Bank of Mexico and as a consultant for the World Bank.