[9] She received the Wolf Balleisen Memorial Award from for completing her 96-page long senior thesis, titled "The Economic Determinants of Age at First Birth in United States Metropolitan Areas: An Empirical Analysis", under the supervision of Anne Case.
[10] She then pursued graduate studies with the support of a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Harry S. Truman Scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received a PhD in economics in 2002 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Essays on public policy and consumer choice: applications to welfare reform and state lotteries", under the supervision of Jonathan Gruber and Joshua Angrist.
Early in her career she published a study documenting that the controversial welfare family cap policy did not lead to a reduction in births, as intended.
In subsequent work published by the Brookings Institution, the authors document a similar finding with regard to high school drop-out behavior.
The Aspen Economic Strategy Group (AESG) was launched in 2017 under the leadership of co-chairs Henry M. Paulson, Jr., former secretary of the Treasury and chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff and president of the University of North Carolina system.