Elena Patel, Ph.D.

Elena is an Assistant Professor in the Finance Department at the University of Utah and Faculty Advisor at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2013. She spent six years working as a Financial Economist in the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, where she worked extensively on issues of optimal corporate taxation. As an applied microeconomist, her main research interests are in the fields of industrial organization, health economics, regulatory economics, and public finance. Her research agenda focuses on the behavioral responses of businesses to the U.S. tax system. In addition, she has done work developing a greater understanding of the competitive interaction between nontraditional organizational firm structures, including associated antitrust issues. Finally, she works on issues of female labor supply and responses to paid family leave policies.