Nirupama Rao

Nirupama Rao is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns the economic effects of fiscal policy, focusing on the impact of policy on firm production, investment and pricing decisions. She has studied how excise taxes on oil production affect the extraction decisions of domestic producers, the effectiveness of federal tax credits for R&D, and investigated the composition and importance of corporate deferred taxes. In other work she has examined how regulation and taxation interact in alcohol markets and the implications of pricing behavior for tax pass-through.

She is a recipient of the National Tax Association Dissertation Award and the 2019 Journal of Public Economics Atkinson award for the best paper in the published in the prior three years. Rao completed her PhD in economics at MIT in June 2010 where she previously earned her undergraduate degree. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She recently served as a Senior Economist from 2015 through 2016 at the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, D.C.

Education

• Ph.D. M.I.T. (2005 — 2010)
• B.S. M.I.T. (2000 — 2004)
• B.S. MIT Sloan School of Management

ARTICLES

• Investment Differences Between Public and Private Firms: Evidence From U.S. Tax Returns
  Jesse Edgerton, Naomi Feldman, Laura Kawano, Elena Patel, Nirupama Rao and Michael Stevens, 04/2021, Journal of Public EconomicsVolume: 196 Issue: April 2021 Pages: 104370

• Discrete Prices and the Implications for Incidence and Efficiency of Excise Taxes
  Chris Conlon and Nirupama Rao, 11/2020, AEJ - Economic Policy Volume: 12 Issue: 4 Pages: 111-143

• The Lifecycle of the 47 Percent
  Don Fullerton and Nirupama L.Rao, 06/2019, National Tax Journal Volume: 72 Issue: 2 Pages: 359-396

• Do Public and Private Firms Invest Differently?
  Laura Kawano, Elena Patel and Nirupama Rao, 11/2018, CLS Blue Sky Blog: Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets

• Taxation and the Extraction of Exhaustible Resources: Evidence from California Oil Production
  Nirupama L. Rao, 11/2018, AEJ - Economic Policy Volume: 10 Issue: 4 Pages: 268-301

• Makers, takers, and the lifecycle of the 47%: An assessment of US households’ tax dependence
  Don Fullerton and Nirupama Rao, 05/2017, Vox EU

• Dividends and Investment: Evidence of Heterogeneous Firm Behavior
  Aparna Mathur, Nirupama S. Rao, Michael R. Strain and Stan A. Veuger, 11/2016, Public Finance Review Volume: 44 Issue: 6 Pages: 769 - 787