Purvi Sevak
Senior Researcher, Mathematica Policy Research
Purvi Sevak is a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. Dr. Sevak was formerly an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Hunter College at the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. (2002) and M.A. (1998) degrees in Economics at the University of Michigan. Before attending graduate school at Michigan, she received a B.S. degree (1995) in Policy Analysis from Cornell University and spent two years as a research assistant for the Lewin Group, a health policy consulting firm in Virginia.
Professor Sevak’s research to date has concentrated on issues related to retirement savings. While at Michigan, Sevak received the Steven Sandell Dissertation award from the MRRC for her research on the effect of the stock market boom in the late 1990s on retirement behavior. She is currently working on projects examining how immigrants fare in retirement and how house prices effect retirement. She recently completed an MRRC funded study examining labor supply elasticities of older workers. Her research portfolio also includes work on the financial consequences of widowhood, the interaction of welfare reform and the SSI program, and the responsiveness of retiree residential location to property taxes.