Christopher DeMuth was president of AEI from December 1986 through December 2008. Previously, he was administrator for information and regulatory affairs in the Office of Management and Budget and executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration; taught economics, law, and regulatory policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; practiced regulatory, antitrust, and general corporate law; and worked on urban and environmental policy in the Nixon White House.

Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University, as well as a policy consultant to the Treasury Department during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He served as an economic adviser to the George W. Bush 2004 presidential campaign, chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries, senior economic adviser to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign, and economic adviser to the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign.   Mr. Hassett is a columnist for National Review.

Glenn Hubbard, a former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is currently the dean of Columbia Business School. He specializes in public and corporate finance and financial markets and institutions. He has written more than ninety articles and books, including two textbooks, on corporate finance, investment decisions, banking, energy economics, and public policy. He has served as a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Treasury Department and as a consultant to, among others, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Kent Smetters is the Boettner Chair Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury. He coauthored Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: New Budget Measures for New Budget Priorities (AEI Press, 2003) and coedited The Pension Challenge: Risk Transfers and Retirement Income Security (Oxford University Press, 2004). He has published academic articles in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and The Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is often cited in major media outlets.

Alan D. Viard is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies federal tax and budget policy.

Prior to joining AEI, Viard was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University. He has also been a visiting scholar at the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis, a senior economist at the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, and a staff economist at the Joint Committee on Taxation of the US Congress. While at AEI, Viard has also taught public finance at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. Earlier in his career, Viard spent time in Japan as a visiting scholar at Osaka University’s Institute of Social and Economic Research.

A prolific writer, Viard is a frequent contributor to AEI’s “On the Margin” column in Tax Notes and was nominated for Tax Notes’s 2009 Tax Person of the Year. He has also testified before Congress, and his work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including Room for Debate in The New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Bloomberg, NPR’s Planet Money, and The Hill. Viard is the coauthor of “Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited” (2012) and “The Real Tax Burden: Beyond Dollars and Cents” (2011), and the editor of “Tax Policy Lessons from the 2000s” (2009).

Viard received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in economics from Yale University. He also completed the first year of the J.D. program at the University of Chicago Law School, where he qualified for law review and was awarded the Joseph Henry Beale prize for legal research and writing.

Alex Brill, a former policy director and chief economist of the House Ways and Means Committee, also served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). In Congress and at the CEA, Mr. Brill worked on a variety of economic and legislative policy issues, including dividend taxation, the alternative minimum tax, international tax policy, social security reform, defined benefit pension reform, and U.S. trade policy.

At AEI, Mr. Brill studies the impact of tax policy in the U.S. economy; the fiscal, economic, and political consequences of stimulus legislation; health care reform, pharmaceutical spending, unemployment insurance reform; and financial innovation and technology.