Charlie Rafkin

In January 2026, I'll join the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Economics, following postdocs at Berkeley (Fall 2024–Summer 2025) and Stanford (Fall 2025).

I received my PhD in Economics from MIT in 2024.

I am a public and behavioral economist. I study topics including poverty, low-income housing markets, and transfer programs. My research often incorporates ideas from psychology and sociology to examine how non-classical forces affect policy efficacy and social welfare.

Working Papers

Publications

Code & Resources

GitHub repo containing simple Javascript code for improving Qualtrics surveys. Also includes a few other tricks for general research workflow.

A checklist that I run through before launching any Qualtrics survey.

scfses: A Stata program to obtain quantiles of variables (point estimates and standard errors) in the Survey of Consumer Finances.