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Robert Jackman

Official · Treasury

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Official · Treasury
Programs
PPP
Updated
  • Pandemic-program role: Career Treasury economist who co-authored Treasury's own empirical defense of the Paycheck Protection Program: the Office of Economic Policy working paper claiming PPP saved ~18.6 million jobs.
  • Institution · office: Treasury · Office of Economic Policy · Type: career
  • Tenure (relief-relevant): Economist, Office of Economic Policy, at the time of the December 2020 working paper (paper affiliation footnote); start and end dates not documented.

The job (role mechanics)

  • Level / appointment: Career staff economist (the paper's affiliation footnote gives his title as Economist; grade and step not documented).
  • Reports to: Up through the Office of Economic Policy chain to the Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy (Michael Faulkender in 2020) and Deputy Assistant Secretaries; ultimately the Secretary of the Treasury (Mnuchin, 2020).
  • Core responsibility: Produce Treasury's in-house economic analysis, forecasting, and program evaluation.
  • Pay: Not documented (no first-party salary record).
  • Expectations / mandate: Career economists supply non-partisan technical analysis to political principals; they author and co-author Office of Economic Policy research and working papers.
  • Tenure norm: Career civil servant.

Who they are

Robert Jackman is an academic labor economist who served as a career staff economist in Treasury's Office of Economic Policy during the pandemic. On his own personal academic site he describes himself as "a recent economics PhD, currently working at the United States Treasury," researching "Labor Markets, with a secondary focus on Macroeconomics and International Trade." He co-authored the paper with two political appointees, Assistant Secretary Michael Faulkender and Senior Advisor Stephen I. Miran.

Education

  • Economics Ph.D. (his personal site: "a recent economics PhD"); the University of Chicago affiliation is cited to the Becker Friedman Institute directory; we do not have a copy.
  • Earlier degrees not documented in first-party sources.

Career before

  • His job-market paper, per his site, studies "how workers respond to adverse labor market events such as layoffs, which workers will successfully recover from job loss, and how we might best help those workers who tend not to recover."
  • Limited first-party biographical trail beyond his academic site; pre-Treasury employment history is thin in public sources.

Role in the pandemic relief programs

  • Jackman is the middle-listed co-author of Treasury's official PPP job-preservation study: The Job-Preservation Effects of Paycheck Protection Program Loans, Office of Economic Policy Working Paper 2020-01, dated December 16, 2020 (cover: "December 2020"). The PDF's affiliation footnote identifies him as "Economist, Economic Policy, United States Treasury."
  • The verbatim author line reads: "Michael Faulkender, Robert Jackman, and Stephen I. Miran." Faulkender is footnoted "Assistant Secretary, Economic Policy"; Miran "Senior Advisor, Economic Policy ... & corresponding author." Jackman is the only one of the three flagged simply as a staff Economist.
  • The paper's headline claim is that moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile county by early PPP coverage improved the insured unemployment rate by "over 12 percentage points, or, extrapolated nationally, 18.6 million jobs", an estimate the paper itself says is "an order of magnitude larger than previous evaluations of PPP."
  • The paper's acknowledgements disclose that Faulkender and Miran "contributed to Treasury's efforts to support the Small Business Administration's implementation of PPP"; the disclosure does not mention Jackman.
  • On his personal site, Jackman characterizes it as "my most recent working paper ... studies how Paycheck Protection Program loans supported employment in the United States, finding substantially stronger effects than in previous evaluations," with the standard career-staff disclaimer that "all views in papers are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Treasury."

Documents written or signed

  • Treasury Office of Economic Policy Working Paper 2020-01 — The Job-Preservation Effects of Paycheck Protection Program Loans (Faulkender, Jackman & Miran), December 16, 2020. PDF: The Job Preservation Effects Of PPP Loans (original: home.treasury.gov · stored capture) — co-author. Also mirrored on SSRN (abstract id 3767509).
  • No signed rulemakings or Federal Register items (career economists do not sign IFRs; that was the political principals, e.g., Faulkender on the Jan 14, 2021 PPP Interim Final Rule (Federal Register PDF)).

Career after / where they are now

  • Later positions are not documented in any source we have.
  • His personal academic site, as of June 25, 2026, still described him as "currently working at the United States Treasury."

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources (first-party)

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