Jon Hartley

Economics and Finance Researcher

Hello! I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market. You can find the latest version of my job market paper here. Also please see the Research section of this website for a complete list of all my academic papers and publications.

JOB MARKET PAPER

“Does Government Debt Management Matter? High-Frequency Identification From U.S. Treasury Quarterly Refunding Announcements” with Lorenzo Rigon, 2025 Macro Finance Society Workshop Poster Presentation. Media: MacroMusings Interview 1, MacroMusings Intervew 2, Related Wall Street Journal OpEd.

ABSTRACT

This paper measures the impact of surprises in the relative supply of U.S. Treasury securities at different maturities on yields, enabling us to construct a novel measure of relative Treasury demand curves. Surprises are measured as the difference between the supply announced by the U.S. Treasury Department at Quarterly Refunding Announcements and a novel dataset of pre-announcement expectations of supply (duration) from primary dealers. The reaction of Treasury yields is measured in a tight intraday window around the announcement, to tightly identify the causal effect of supply surprises on yields. We find that a 0.07% to 0.20% increase in the 3-month to 10-year term spread is associated with every one percent of GDP of unexpected ten year equivalent duration issued in the next 3 months, which is larger than prior estimates in the literature. We derive implications of these empirical effects in a model of optimal debt management used by the U.S. Treasury Department. We find that recalibrating the magnitude of relative Treasury supply effects in line with our estimates lowers the optimal weighted-average maturity in favor of shorter-duration government debt issuance. This is consistent with simple theories of term premia adjusting to the total quantity of duration supply, suggesting that imperfect risk sharing in an overlapping-generations macroeconomic model is sufficient to break Ricardian equivalence.

ACADEMIC ECONOMICS/FINANCE PUBLICATIONS AND SUBMITTED WORK

“Management and Firm Dynamism”, with Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh, and John Van Reenen, Reject and Resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics, SED 2024, New York Fed Liberty Street Economics Blog Post, NBER Working Paper No. 33765, New York Fed Staff Report No. 1157, Harvard Business Working Paper No. 25-052, SIEPR Working Paper, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 20602

“Analyzing Occupational Licensing Across Nations”, with Morris Kleiner, 2026, forthcoming in preparation for Journal of Labor Economics Special Issue on Occupational Licensing

“The Pricing of U.S. Treasury Floating Rate Notes”, with Urban Jermann, Journal of Financial Economics, May 2024. NBER Working Paper No. 27065, ASSA/AFA 2021

“Do Pre-Registration and Pre-Analysis Plans Reduce p-Hacking and Publication Bias?: Evidence from 15,992 Test Statistics and Suggestions for Improvement” with Abel Brodeur, Nikolai Cook, and Anthony Heyes, Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, 2024, Volume 2, Number 3, pp. 527-561. IZA Discussion Paper No. 15476, SIEPR Working Paper, MetaArXiv, Advances in Field Experiments Conference 2023

“De-Dollarization? Not So Fast”, with Felix Gerding, Economics Letters, March 2024. See de-dollarization.org website. Media: Marketwatch, Marginal Revolution, National Review

“The Local Residential Land Use Regulatory Environment Across U.S. Housing Markets: Evidence From a New Wharton Index”, with Joseph Gyourko and Jacob Krimmel, Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 124, July 2021, previously NBER Working Paper No. 26573, [Data Files], Media: The Wall Street Journal 1, The Wall Street Journal 2, MarketWatch, City Journal, Marginal Revolution, The Economic Report of the President 2020, The Economic Report of the President 2024

“Friedman’s Plucking Model: New International Evidence From Maddison Project Data”, Economics Letters, Vol. 199, February 2021

NBER Working Papers | VoxEU Columns | Google Scholar | RePEC | SSRN

Bio:

Jon Hartley is an economist specializing in finance, labor economics, and macroeconomics. He is currently a Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an economics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, a Research Fellow at the UT-Austin Civitas Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Jon also is the host of the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution, founder of GenerativeAI Research, a member of the Canadian Group of Economists, and founding chair of the Economic Club of Miami.

Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a Fixed Income Portfolio Construction and Risk Management Associate and as a Quantitative Investment Strategies Client Portfolio Management Senior Analyst and in various policy/governmental roles at the World Bank, IMF, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada.

Jon is a graduate of the University of Chicago (B.A. in Economics and Mathematics with Honors), from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (M.B.A.), and the Harvard Kennedy School (M.P.P.).

Jon has testified before Congress, has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes and The Huffington Post. Jon has also appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, Bloomberg, NBC, and BBC News, and was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 Law & Policy list, the 2017 Wharton 40 Under 40 list and was previously a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

Jon also is a passionate football fan in his spare time and once worked as an analytics intern for the Dallas Cowboys and announced a Cowboys draft pick at the 2017 NFL Draft.