Ryan Bhandari

I have written papers on pricing the externalities from homeless encampments in Los Angeles, the impact of salary cuts on attrition among staffers on Capitol Hill, and co-authored a paper that improves on measurements of the undocumented population.
Prior to starting my PhD in economics, I worked for three years as a senior economic policy advisor at Third Way in Washington, DC where I specialized in access to capital, writing a large report on venture capital’s inability to reach enough would-be entrepreneurs and subsequent policy memos on levers the federal government can pull to incentivize investments in a broad array of new businesses. I also created a one-of-a-kind “Opportunity Index” that measured what percentage of jobs in the top 200 largest metro areas can adequately provide what my co-author and me defined as a middle-class life. The study went on to be featured on the front page of USA Today and featured across multiple media outlets including Axios, MSNBC, the Daily Mail, and more. Senators Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar as well as Governor Andy Beshear praised the work on their social media accounts.