June 6, 2005
Speaker Biographies
Alan J. Auerbach is the Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, director of the Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and former chairman of the Economics Department at the University of California–Berkeley. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, he taught at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania and was deputy chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress. Professor Auerbach has been a consultant to several government agencies and institutions in the United States and abroad. He has served as a member of the Executive Committee and as vice president of the American Economic Association, and is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
William G. Gale is a senior fellow and holds the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is deputy director of the Economic Studies Program and co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. His areas of expertise include tax policy, budget and fiscal policy, and public and private saving behavior and pensions. Before joining Brookings, Mr. Gale was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California–Los Angeles and served as a senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers. He has also served as a consultant to the General Accounting Office and the World Bank. He is the coeditor of Private Pensions and Public Policy (2004); Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation (2001); Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform (1996); and The Evolving Pension System: Trends, Effects, and Proposals for Reform (forthcoming), all published by Brookings.
Michael J. Graetz is the Justus S. Hotchkiss Professor of Law at Yale University. Before becoming a professor at Yale in 1983, he was a professor of law at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California law schools, and a professor of law and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Graetz has served as assistant to the secretary and special counsel at the Department of the Treasury, as Treasury deputy assistant secretary for tax policy, and on the Internal Revenue Service commissioner’s Advisory Group. Additionally, Mr. Graetz has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and has received an award from Esquire magazine for courses and work in connection with providing shelter for the homeless. His publications on the subject of federal taxation include a leading law school text and more than fifty articles on a wide range of tax, health policy, social insurance, and tax compliance issues. His most recent books include True Security: Rethinking Social Insurance (Yale University Press, 1999) and The U.S. Income Tax: What It Is, How It Got That Way and Where We Go From Here (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999). Articles Mr. Graetz has authored include “The ‘Original Intent’ of U.S. International Taxation” (Duke Law Journal, 1997) and “Taxing International Income: Inadequate Principles, Outdated Concepts and Unsatisfactory Policies” (Tax Law Review, 2001).
Robert E. Hall is the Robert and Carole McNeil Professor of Economics and senior fellow at Stanford University. Mr. Hall is an applied economist with interests in technology, competition, employment issues, and economic policy in the aggregate economy and in particular markets. His current research focuses on levels of activity and employment and stock-market valuations in market economies and on the economics of high technology. Hall is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. Before coming to Stanford University in 1978, Mr. Hall taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of California–Berkeley. He has advised a number of government agencies on national economic policy, including the Justice Department, the Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board, and served on the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. Mr. Hall currently serves as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s research program on economic fluctuations and growth, an interuniversity research organization, and is chairman of the bureau's Committee on Business Cycle Dating. Mr. Hall has worked with Hoover Institution colleague Alvin Rabushka to develop a comprehensive tax reform based on a flat tax, which the two wrote about first in December 1981 in an influential article in the Wall Street Journal, and more extensively in their book, The Flat Tax (Hoover Institution Press, 1985). Mr. Hall is coauthor with Marc Lieberman of Economics: Principles and Applications (South Western, 1997).
Kevin A. Hassett is director of economic policy studies and 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 at Columbia University. He was an economic advisor to the Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election, and was the chief economic advisor 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. 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, the CBS Morning Show, the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin has spent his professional career as an economist in academia and government. He is on leave from Syracuse University, where he holds the post of trustee professor of economics at the Maxwell School. His previous positions at Syracuse include chairman of the Department of Economics and associate director of the Center for Policy Research. Before Syracuse University, he held academic posts at Columbia University and Princeton University. Before joining CBO, Mr. Holtz-Eakin served for eighteen months as chief economist of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He also served as senior staff economist for the council in 1989 and 1990. In addition, he has been a faculty research fellow and research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Economics Advisory Panel to the National Science Foundation, and a visiting scholar at AEI. At the state level, he has served as a consultant for commissions and agencies in Arizona, New York, and New Jersey. Mr. Holtz-Eakin has a broad interest in the economics of public policy. He has studied the role of federal taxes in home ownership, the contribution of inventories to the business cycle, and a wide variety of topics in state and local government finance. Recently, his research has centered around the economics of fundamental tax reform; the effects of public infrastructure on productivity; income mobility in the United States; and the role of families, capital markets, health insurance, and tax policy in the success of business ventures. Mr. Holtz-Eakin has served as editor of the National Tax Journal and has been a member of the editorial boards of a wide range of economic journals, including Economics and Politics, Small Business Economics, Journal of Sports Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Public Works Management and Policy.
Casey B. Mulligan is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. He has also served as a visiting professor of public economics at Harvard University, Clemson University, and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He is affiliated with a number of professional organizations, including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, and the Population Research Center. Mr. Mulligan has received numerous awards and fellowships, including those from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation. He is author of Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 1997), which studies economic models of, and statistical evidence on, the intergenerational transmission of economic status. His recent research is concerned with capital and labor taxation, with particular emphasis on tax incidence and positive theories of public policy. His recent work-in-progress includes Social Security in Theory and Practice (a book with Columbia Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin) and articles such as “Deadweight Costs and the Size of Government,” “Do Democracies Have Different Public Policies Than Nondemocracies?,” “Induced Retirement, Social Security, and the Pyramid Mirage,” “What do Aggregate Consumption Euler Equations Say about the Capital Income Tax Burden?,” and “Public Policies as Specification Errors.” Mr. Mulligan has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Ronald A. Pearlman is professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a tax partner in the law firm of Covington & Burling. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Pearlman served with the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington. After fifteen years of private law practice in St. Louis, he returned to Washington in 1983 to serve first as the deputy assistant secretary for tax Policy at the U.S. Treasury, and then as the assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, a presidential appointment. At the Treasury, he had overall responsibility for development of the department's 1984 tax reform proposals and President Ronald Reagan's 1985 tax reform recommendations to the Congress. He represented the administration during the consideration of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 by the House of Representatives. After a brief return to private practice, he was appointed chief of staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, where he served from 1988 to1990. Over the years, Mr. Pearlman has served in a number of professional organizations and advisory groups, including as vice-chair (government relations) of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation, as a consultant to two tax policy projects of the American Law Institute, and as president of the American Tax Policy Institute. He has also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and on the adjunct faculties of the University of Virginia School of Law and Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. He has lectured at the Japan Ministry of Finance and at the Escuela Superior de Adminsitración y Dirección de Empresas Law School in Barcelona, Spain. Mr. Pearlman has testified before Congress over thirty times on tax policy matters.
Daniel N. Shaviro is a visiting scholar at AEI and is among the nation’s leading legal scholars on tax policy. Before entering law teaching, he spent three years in private practice at Caplin & Drysdale, a leading tax specialty firm, and three years as legislation attorney at the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, where he worked extensively on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In 1987, Shaviro began his teaching career at the University of Chicago Law School, and he joined the NYU School of Law in 1995. Mr. Shaviro’s scholarly work examines tax policy and public finance issues from an economic and political science perspective, with attention as well to questions of distributive justice and to the present tax system’s institutional and administrative details. Books he has published include Making Sense of Social Security Reform (2000), When Rules Change: An Economic and Political Analysis of Transition Relief and Retroactivity (2000), and Do Deficits Matter? (1997), all published by the University of Chicago Press.
View Event Details
