Ana Vasilj is an ABF/University of Chicago Doctoral Fellow in Law and Social Science. Vasilj is a JD candidate and a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Chicago.
Her research lies at the intersection of taxation, public economics, and law. Much of her work considers tax-and-transfer systems, which aim to ask more of those who can afford it and to direct support to those who need it most. A challenge facing these systems is the reality that a person’s or a firm’s true capacity to pay can never be observed directly. Governments must instead read it off imperfect signals—what people and firms earn, what they buy, how their businesses are organized. Vasilj’s research asks what those signals genuinely reveal and what that means for designing tax-and-transfer policy that raises revenue fairly without needlessly distorting the choices of individuals and firms.
Vasilj’s work develops new empirical methods to study household spending, asking whether differences in what families buy—beyond differences in income—can justify policies such as grocery tax exemptions and food assistance programs like SNAP. She also turns to the taxation of businesses, examining how a firm’s choice of legal form interacts with the tax code and whether the business profits governments seek to tax are themselves shaped by taxation. Across these projects, she combines economic theory with new data and empirical designs to inform questions of tax fairness and efficiency that have long occupied both economists and legal scholars.
Vaslij holds an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in economics from the University of Cambridge, where she studied at Trinity College.