Richard Evans

Richard W. Evans, Ph.D. is President and Co-founder of Open Research Group, Inc. (OpenRG). He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. Evans also holds appointments as Senior Editor at CGO and Director of the Open Source Economics Laboratory. Evans specializes in macroeconomics, public economics, and computational economics and is currently leading a project at CGO to build 50 open-source state microsimulation models of household tax and benefit policy as well as open access data to support those models.

Evans has held previous positions at the University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute, Tax Policy Center, Rice University, and Brigham Young University. He has founded, funded, and directed two major open-source and open-access student mentoring computational economics research and training programs: Open Source Economics Laboratory, University of Chicago 2017- 2020 and BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Laboratory, Brigham Young University 2012-2016. Evans 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.

Evans' research focuses on the macroeconomic effects of taxes and spending on government deficits and debt, 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. Evans is a core maintainer of the OG-Core open-source large-scale overlapping generations macroeconomic model fiscal policy and its country-specific calibrations, and has provided macroeconomic modeling consulting services to the European Commission, World Bank, and Indian Ministry of Finance.

Evans holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin (2008, 2005), an M.A. in public policy from Brigham Young University (2003), and a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University (1998).