State & Local

Subtopics

Featured Commentary

Articles

California’s Businesses Stop Hiring

August 7, 2024 By Lee Ohanian

via California on Your Mind

Articles

How Healthy Are Local And State Finances?

May 1, 2024 By Oliver Giesecke

via Defining Ideas

learn more

Videos

The Trillion Dollar Pension Problem

Left unchecked, swelling pension deficits estimated at over $6.5 trillion could eventually bankrupt state economies and hurt public services like infrastructure and education, negatively impacting…

February 22, 2024 By Oliver Giesecke

via PolicyEd

Articles

The Coming Budget Cuts Are Just The Beginning

June 11, 2024 By Joshua D. Rauh

via Los Angeles Times

Articles

If Kamala Wins: The California Ripple Effect

August 28, 2024 By Bill Whalen

via California on Your Mind

Articles

California’s One-Party State And Housing Subsidies For Undocumented Migrants

September 4, 2024 By Lee Ohanian

via California on Your Mind

Fellows in this Policy Area

Joshua D. Rauh

Senior Fellow

Learn more

Joshua D. Rauh

Senior Fellow

Joshua Rauh is the Ormond Family Professor of Finance at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He leads the Hoover Institution State and Local Governance Initiative. He formerly served at the White House where he was principal chief economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2019-20), and taught at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business (2004–9) and the Kellogg School of Management (2009–12). At the Hoover Institution he has served as Director of Research (2018-19). Rauh studies government pension liabilities, corporate investment, business taxation, and investment management. His research on pension systems and public finance has received national media coverage in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Economist, and he has testified before Congress on these topics. His PragerU video “Public Pensions: An Economic Time Bomb” has been viewed over four million times on the PragerU website and over three million times on YouTube. He has published numerous journal articles and has received various awards recognizing his scholarship including the Brattle Prize and the Smith Breeden Prize of the American Finance Association. His scholarly papers have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Public Economics. Prior to his academic career, he was an associate economist at Goldman Sachs in London. Rauh received a BA from Yale University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in economics.

Lee Ohanian

Senior Fellow (adjunct)

Learn more

Lee Ohanian

Senior Fellow (adjunct)

Lee E. Ohanian is a senior fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is associate director of the Center for the Advanced Study in Economic Efficiency at Arizona State University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he codirects the research initiative Macroeconomics across Time and Space. He is also a fellow in the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. His research focuses on economic crises, economic growth, and the impact of public policy on the economy. Ohanian is coeditor of Government Policies and Delayed Economic Recovery (Hoover Institution Press, 2012). He is an adviser to the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and St. Louis, has previously advised other Federal Reserve banks, foreign central banks, and the National Science Foundation, and has testified to national and state legislative committees on economic policy. He is on the editorial boards of Econometrica and Macroeconomic Dynamics. He is a frequent media commentator and writes for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Investor’s Business Daily. He has won numerous teaching awards at UCLA and the University of Rochester. He previously served on the faculties of the Universities of Minnesota and Pennsylvania and as vice president at Security Pacific Bank. He received his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester.