During my First-Year Fellows internship at The Brookings Institution, I focused on housing finance projects related to the latest paper I co-authored with my supervisor and mentor, Aaron Klein ’98, and related to the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System. I also worked on a few other topics, including international capital flows, payments, and macroprudential regulation.
Major learning opportunities included getting up to speed on the complex U.S. financial system over the course of a few weeks and being able to make significant contributions to cutting-edge research projects at Brookings within the eight-week timeline. The financial system is an incredibly complex system of markets, financial institutions, and regulatory agencies; the system’s modern regulatory framework is the result of layered legislation over the past century. Getting up to speed quickly required some of the fastest learning I had ever done in my life with both breadth in covering a wide range of topics and depth in understanding the details of an issue in the discourse. Throughout my experience at Brookings, not only did I learn a significant amount about the economy, but I honed my ability to conceptualize and organize my work related to larger-scale research projects and academic publications.
The paper discusses the impact of the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) large-scale mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchases—a component of the quantitative easing (QE) program—on housing inflation during the Covid-19 induced recession and recovery. The thesis is that the Fed's purchases of MBS contributed to the housing boom that occurred from 2020 to 2022. During this period, the Fed bought 90% of the increase in agency MBS and the average home value in the US rose by $100k, of which $75k was above trend. The paper outlines why we believe there is a causal connection and how it propelled the housing inflation the Fed subsequently raised rates to combat.
In the entire history of the Fed, QE has only been used four times, and three of them were used to assist the economy’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Only the fourth round, known as QE4, was in response to the Covid-19 induced recession. As a result, QE is not nearly as well understood as the Fed’s traditional monetary policy tools. Specifically within QE, the impact of large-scale purchases of MBS on housing absent a housing crisis is largely unexplored, as it happened for the first time in 2020. Given QE’s enormous impact in the U.S. and abroad, studying QE—and large-scale MBS purchases in particular—is incredibly exciting because it is at the frontier of monetary policy research.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell delivered a speech on Oct 14, 2025 at the 67th Annual Meeting of the National Association for Business Economics in Philadelphia where he addressed critiques of QE4. Powell cited our paper in reference to a discussion about the inclusion of MBS in their asset purchases. While, as Powell says, “the extent to which these MBS purchases disproportionately affected housing market conditions during this period is challenging to determine,” he acknowledged that the Fed “could have—and perhaps should have—stopped asset purchases sooner.” I am grateful for our work to be cited by Chair Powell and hope that our paper sparks further discourse on QE at the Fed, other central banks, in the academic community, and beyond. Our paper has also been mentioned by Politico and Axios in discussion of the Fed’s balance sheet and housing finance. QE is such an impactful tool and it is important that we hone our use of unconventional monetary policy, ensuring that it best promotes economic well-being.
In addition to Quantitative Easing and housing inflation post-COVID, I also co-authored an article at Brookings on the FHLB system with Aaron Klein and Prof. Kathryn Judge, titled “How to fix Federal Home Loan Banks.” We summarize a comment letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency and describe how profit motives at FHLBs have tilted their actions away from their public mission. Some time after publishing this piece, Senators Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) introduced the “Curtailing Unreasonable Remuneration at Banks Act” (CURB Act) which would implement one of our recommendations to realign executive compensation at FHLBs with Fed Regional Banks and their public mission.
I’m continuing my Dartmouth journey with exciting research in economics with Prof. David Blanchflower on the youth mental health crisis. In the last decade, the well-being of young people has drastically declined globally, and we’re in the process of pinpointing the magnitude, extent, and causes of the crisis. We recently published a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research on the importance of data collection mode for results from well-being surveys. I’m also working with Prof. Andrew Levin on interesting research about monetary policy committee dynamics, continuing my exploration of monetary economics from an organizational design perspective. Finally, I have been a researcher for the Policy Research Shop for two years and recently presented our policy brief on GLP-1 coverage in New Hampshire to members of the state legislature.
I would highly encourage folks interested in public policy and the social sciences to apply for First-Year Fellows and to take advantage of other exceptional opportunities at Rocky, such as the Policy Research Shop where I also had a truly outstanding experience. These programs have been instrumental in my growth, giving me the chance to learn from mentors and put my skills into practice in meaningful ways. I’m very appreciative of the First-Year Fellows program and grateful for the opportunity to work at a world-class think tank, collaborating with the extraordinary experts at Brookings. The experience was deeply transformative. I'm especially grateful to have worked with Aaron. He has been collaborating with Rocky as a mentor for First-Year Fellows for many years now and has been a great support to many Dartmouth students.