Speaker Biographies

September 22, 2005

Steven J. Davis studies the effect of taxes on work activity, the creation and loss of jobs, the employment impact of wage-setting rules, and other labor market issues. He is a professor of international business and economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously taught at Brown University and MIT and served as a consultant and researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. As a visiting scholar at AEI, Davis will study how tax differences in states and countries lead to differences in employment, household work, and leisure time.

Alberto Alesina is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, where he is chairman of the Department of Economics. He is a member of the NBER and the CEPR. He has published five books and edited many more, including The Size of Nations (MIT Press) and Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference (Oxford University Press). In addition he has published scholarly papers in all the leading economic journals and written columns for many of the world’s leading newspapers. He has been a coeditor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for eight years and associate editor of many academic journals. His work has covered a variety of topics, including political business cycles, the political economy of fiscal policy and budget deficits, the process of European integration, stabilization policies in high inflation countries, the determination of the size of countries, currency unions, the political economic determinants of redistributive policies, differences in the welfare state in the United States and Europe and, more generally, differences in the economic system in the United States and Europe, the effect of alternative electoral systems on economic policies, and the determination of the choice of different electoral systems. His scholarly work has been extensively cited and has been widely influential.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. 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. He was an economic adviser to the Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including the forthcoming Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press). He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. His popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

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