Tyan Lee
Postbaccalaureate Researcher
Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences
I received my Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Economics from Stanford University in June 2026. At IRiSS, I’m currently working on a policymaker-facing tool that recommends homelessness policy suites tailored to their specific locality, priorities, and budgets. I am also developing a quasi-experimental study on the causal effect of psych holds on future outcomes among people experiencing homelessness (PEH).
I’m also interested in history, cultural theory, politics, and textual criticism of the New Testament and Hebrew Bible. In my spare time, I enjoy attending GSV and PWHL games and playing the drums in my grunge band, Hot Pocket Nepo Baby.
Research Areas
Homelessness Policy
- A Policymaker-Facing Recommendation Tool for Homelessness Interventions
With Prof. David Grusky and Dr. Derek Christopher, I am creating a first-of-its-kind policymaker-facing recommendation tool for homelessness interventions, sensitive to each Continuum of Care’s local context.
- Psychiatric Holds and Outcomes Among People Experiencing Homelessness
An early-stage co-authored project: we plan to use quasi-experimental methods to estimate the causal effects of psychiatric holds on people experiencing homelessness (PEH).
- Bridging Homelessness and Census Data: A CoC-to-Place Geographic Crosswalk
A CoC-to-place crosswalk I created to bridge census and homelessness data sources, presented as a poster at Evidence, Experience, and Pathways: A Convening on Unsheltered Homelessness in L.A. (USC HPRI and SIEPR, Mar 2026).
Inequality and Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics
- Empirical MPCs and the Dynamics of Fiscal Stimulus
My honors thesis, advised by Prof. Adrien Auclert, recovers an empirical joint distribution of income, liquid wealth, and MPCs to calibrate a heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian model of fiscal stimulus. It won the Anna Laura Myers Prize for Outstanding Honors Thesis.
- The Race Between Asset Supply and Asset Demand
With Prof. Adrien Auclert, I wrote Python, Stata, and R code to analyze PSID and DINA data across repositories to ascertain the effect of inequality on asset demand. Published in 2025 as an NBER working paper by Auclert, Malmberg, Rognlie, and Straub, and presented at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole conference.