Daniel Murphy

About

Daniel Murphy is the Jung Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the UVA Darden School of Business. His research centers on cost-effective strategies to prevent and mitigate recessions while safeguarding sustainable public finances. His work blends theoretical and empirical methods, with particular emphasis on how policies affect different segments of society and on the interplay between housing markets and the broader macroeconomy. A substantial share of Murphy’s scholarship analyzes the impact of Department of Defense spending on local economies. Using detailed regional data, he and his co-authors document pervasive economic slack in the United States prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and show that, under such conditions, targeted government spending can meaningfully raise employment and incomes—especially for individuals with lower levels of formal education. Their findings also reveal broader social benefits, including reductions in mortality and disability. Recognizing that elevated public debt levels often constrain the government’s capacity to deploy fiscal stimulus when it is most needed, Murphy develops theoretical mechanisms to combat recessions while minimizing debt growth. His work investigates how the effectiveness of these strategies depends on the nature of a downturn and on the extent of authority delegated to central banks. Murphy also examines how policy choices shape the well-being of low-income households. For instance, while monetary…

Research topics

• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Macroeconomics
• Keynesian economics
• Evolutionary biology
• Biology
• Finance
• Labour economics
• Zoology
• Business

Selected publications

• Inequality, fiscal policy and COVID19 restrictions in a demand-determined economy

  European Economic Review · 2021 · 48 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Drilling and Debt

  The Journal of Finance · 2020 · 43 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This paper documents a previously unrecognized debt‐related investment distortion. Using detailed project‐level data for 69 firms in the oil and gas industry, we find that highly levered firms pull forward investment, completing projects early at the expense of long‐run project returns and project value. This behavior is particularly pronounced prior to debt renegotiations. We test several channels that could explain this behavior and find evidence consistent with equity holders sacrifi…

  PublisherDOI

• Fiscal multipliers in the COVID19 recession

  Journal of International Money and Finance · 2022 · 36 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with widespread shelter-in-place ("lockdown") policies and the associated considerable limits on economic activity. Using detailed regional variation in economic conditions, lockdown policies, and U.S. government spe…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Macroeconomic Frameworks: Reconciling Evidence and Model Predictions from Demand Shocks

  American Economic Journal Macroeconomics · 2024-06-28 · 19 citations

  articleSenior author

  How do demand shocks affect the economy? We exploit detailed data on US defense spending to examine a large set of outcome variables in response to well-identified local demand shocks, jointly examining new outcomes (e.g., firm entry and housing rents) and other key macroeconomic outcomes and elasticities that previously have been estimated separately or in settings with weaker identification. We find that government spending crowds in employment, firm entry, private consumption, and labor produ…

  PublisherDOI

• Saving constraints, inequality, and the credit market response to fiscal stimulus

  European Economic Review · 2022-12-12 · 8 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• ELUCIDATING THE CIS-REGULATORY ARCHITECTURE OF RETINAL BIPOLAR CELLS

  NIH · $123k · 2018–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Richard E. Rothman

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  36 shared

• William J. Powers

  36 shared

• Brooke Sowell

  Reata Pharmaceuticals (United States)

  36 shared

• Eric R. Kandel

  36 shared

• Paul E. Fraser

  University of Toronto

  36 shared

• Himanshu P. Upadhyaya

  36 shared

• Carolyn W. Zhu

  James J. Peters VA Medical Center

  36 shared

• Lars E. Couture

  Mallinckrodt (Japan)

  36 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics and Public Policy

  University of Michigan

Similar researchers at University of Virginia

• Francis E. Warnockh-64
• Dennis T. Yangh-32
• Peter Debaereh-24