Richard Evans

Richard Evans is a senior research fellow and director of open policy at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. He is leading a new project to build a 50-state microsimulation model of individual tax and benefit policy in which all of the project will be open source and open-access.

Formerly an Advisory Board Visiting Fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. He also holds appointments as Director of the Open Source Economics Laboratory, Non-resident Fellow at the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute, President of Open Research Group, Inc., and Senior Editor at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. Evans specializes in macroeconomics, public economics, and computational economics. Rick was previously Associate Director and Senior Lecturer in the M.A. Program in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago from 2016 to 2020 and a Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago from 2016 to 2019. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory at Brigham Young University from 2012 to 2016 and was Assistant Professor in the BYU Economics Department from 2008 to 2016. After receiving a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University in 1998, he began his economic career as a Research Economist at Thredgold Economic Associates in Salt Lake City, providing state and national economic analysis for Zions Bank and their operations in eight western states. Rick later received a M.A. in Public Policy from Brigham Young University in and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. He has also spent time as a researcher at the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Utah Economic Council, and as an economic consultant. Rick’s current research focuses on building large-scale, open-source, dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic models of tax policy and providing web applications and training to allow non-experts to use these models for policy analysis. Rick is a core maintainer of the OG-USA open source large-scale overlapping generations macroeconomic model of U.S. fiscal policy, and has provided macroeconomic modeling consulting services to the European Commission, World Bank, and Indian Ministry of Finance.