CBO welcomed its first visiting scholar in 1999. Since then, the agency has worked with some of the leading minds in the economics and public policy professions. Here are a few of our recent scholars.
Sheng Guo, Ph.D.
September 2014 – December 2014
Sheng Guo is an assistant professor of economics at Florida International University. His research focuses mainly on relationships among income, wealth, and consumption during working years and in retirement. He has also conducted research on how borrowing affects the choices people make about their portfolios and how businesses’ financial distress affects their executives’ pay.
While he was at CBO, Dr. Guo collaborated on research assessing whether and how the Great Recession adversely affected the baby boomers’ retirement security. He also investigated whether the consumption patterns of retired people match the expectations that they formed before retirement.
Hassan A. Tetteh, M.D., M.P.A., M.B.A.
February 2013 - December 2013
Hassan Tetteh is a U.S. Navy Commander and an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. In a recent assignment, he served as Assistant Deputy Commander for Healthcare Operations and Strategic Planning at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. His clinical work includes cardiovascular disease management, heart failure surgery, and heart and lung transplantation.
As a Health Policy Fellow from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, sponsored by the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Tetteh is spending this year providing a clinical perspective at CBO, working with different teams of analysts on a variety of health policy projects. Specifically, he has contributed to studies about the cost of chronic conditions, the costs of obesity and their effects on the federal budget, “supply” issues within the health care workforce, and the impact of health information technology on the federal budget. He is also analyzing policy proposals aimed at achieving savings in Medicare.
Chao Wei, Ph.D.
August 2010–May 2011
George Washington University
Chao Wei is an associate professor of economics at the George Washington University who previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research aims to improve our understanding of the interrelationships between the macroeconomy, financial markets, and asset values. She has also studied how sudden unexpected changes in energy prices can affect the economy, and she has modeled the dynamics of the ways people make economic choices that involve gasoline consumption, driving, and fuel efficiency.
While visiting CBO Dr. Wei collaborated with the staff of the Macroeconomic Analysis Division in research on whether uncertainty about economic productivity increases the extent to which taxes on capital income distort economic activity and thereby reduces people’s well-being, especially when tax rates are high. Quantifying the economic losses from those distortions helps CBO evaluate the possible economic effects of proposed changes in income taxes. Dr. Wei also provided expert help on a range of other issues, including climate change policy, labor supply behavior, and modeling the behavior of the economy over the business cycle.
Reagan A. Baughman, Ph.D.
September 2009–July 2010
University of New Hampshire
Reagan Baughman is an associate professor of economics in the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). Before joining the university faculty, Dr. Baughman was as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Dr. Baughman joined CBO’s Health and Human Resources Division in the midst of the health care policy debate of 2009 and 2010, and she soon became an important member of the health team. Her work was key in collecting and evaluating evidence and helping CBO to develop cost estimates for provisions of law relating to medical malpractice reform and the regulation of private health insurance markets. A coauthor of three letters to Members of Congress explaining the estimates, Dr. Baughman also worked with staff from several CBO divisions on a large project aimed at estimating the health and longevity effects of various government policies.
David Poyer, Ph.D.
June 2009–July 2009
Morehouse College
David Poyer is an associate professor of economics at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Before joining the Morehouse faculty, Dr. Poyer was a visiting assistant professor at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, Illinois. He also taught at Lewis University, in Romeoville, Illinois. During his CBO fellowship, Dr. Poyer worked with the agency’s Macroeconomic Analysis Division to investigate the relationship between the distribution of household income and real (inflation-adjusted) personal consumption spending. Using a procedure called vector error correction, Dr. Poyer found evidence to suggest that changes in income distribution may be important indicators of changes in aggregate spending over time.