Speaker biographies

Rosanne Altshuler served as Senior Economist to the President’s Advisory Panel of Federal Tax Reform. Before joining the Tax Reform Panel, she was acting as a special advisor to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Rosanne will return to Rutgers University where she is an associate professor of economics in January of 2006. Rosanne received her B.A. from Tufts University and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published numerous articles on the economics of taxation in scholarly journals and books. Her work has also appeared in Tax Notes and Tax Notes International. She has served on the Board of Directors of the National Tax Association and has edited the National Tax Journal since 2001.

Thomas A. Barthold is acting chief of staff with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. He joined the Joint Committee staff in 1987. His primary responsibilities for the committee are capital gains taxation, savings incentives, environmental and energy taxes, estate and gift taxation, the taxation of multinational enterprises, the low-income housing tax credit, tax-exempt bonds, and charitable organizations. Prior to his arrival in Washington he was a member of the economics faculty of Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. His publications include studies of capital gain realizations, charitable bequests, and measuring the distribution of the tax burden.

Jared Bernstein joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1992. He is the author of the new book, "All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy." His areas of research include income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, low-wage labor markets and poverty, international comparisons, and the analysis of federal and state economic policies. Between 1995 and 1996, he held the post of deputy chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. He is the co-author of seven editions of the book "State of Working America" and has published extensively in popular and academic venues, including The New York Times, Washington Post, American Prospect, and Research in Economics and Statistics.

Robert Carroll was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis, Treasury Department, in November 2003. He provides economic advice and analysis to the Administration on all aspects of the economics of federal taxation and is responsible for the development, analysis and implementation of tax policies and programs. Previously, Dr. Carroll was a Visiting Scholar with the Congressional Budget Office and also served as Senior Economist (Public Finance) with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers where he provided economic analysis on a variety of issues including the President’s Jobs and Growth Act, tax reform, tax simplification, investment incentives, international taxation, retirement security and the distributional effects of taxes. Prior to CEA, Dr. Carroll was a staff economist with the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis for much of the 1990s and also worked for Ernst & Young, LLP in 1995 and 1996. He holds a Ph.D. and a Masters in Economics from Syracuse University and a B.S. in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany.

Jason Cummins is Chief U.S. Economist for Brevan Howard, an investment fund with $9 billion of assets under management. Previously, Cummins was Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Board, where he coordinated the economic projection and conducted business-cycle research, primarily on investment and productivity. Before joining the Fed, Cummins was assistant professor of economics at New York University, a position he took after having received a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has published widely in such outlets as the American Economic Review and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

Michael P. Devereux is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, UK, and Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He has a PhD from University College London. His research interests are primarily concerned with the impact of different forms of taxation on the behaviour of economic agents, in particular companies. This has involved both theoretical and empirical research on, for example, the impact of taxation on corporate investment and dividend policy, and the location decisions of multinationals. He has published widely in academic journals. He has been closely involved in international tax policy issues in Europe and elsewhere. He has worked with the OECD’s Committee of Fiscal Affairs and the European Commission, in particular with the Ruding Committee and as part of the panel of experts used by the Commission in developing its 2001 proposals for reform of European corporation taxes. He has been actively involved in tax policy in a number of countries. He is Policy Watch editor of International Tax and Public Finance.

William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and the Deputy Director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is also co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings. His areas of expertise include tax policy, budget and fiscal policy, public and private pensions and saving behavior. Gale has written extensively in academic journals and popular outlets, and is co-editor of Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation, Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform, Private Pensions and Public Policies, and The Evolving Pension System: Trends, Effects, and Proposals for Reform, and is co-author of the forthcoming book Taxing the Future: Fiscal Policy in the Bush Administration. Before joining Brookings in 1992, Gale was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Senior Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. 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 George W. 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 AEI book on tax reform, Toward Fundamental Tax Reform. 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.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He most recently served as the sixth Director of the Congressional Budget Office, where he was appointed for a four-year term beginning February 4, 2003. Dr. Holtz-Eakin previously served for 18 months as Chief Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers, where he also served as Senior Staff Economist in 1989 and 1990. Prior to that, Dr. Holtz-Eakin served as CBO's representative on the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board. Dr. Holtz-Eakin previously served as a Trustee Professor of Economics at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. At the Maxwell School, he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics and Associate Director of the Center for Policy Research. He also has served as editor of the National Tax Journal, associate editor of the Journal of Human Resources, and as a member of the editorial board for Public Budgeting & Finance, Economics and Politics, Journal of Sports Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Public Works Management and Policy.  Dr. Holtz-Eakin has a long-standing and 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 on the economics of fundamental tax reform, productivity effects of public infrastructure; income mobility in the United States; and the role of families, capital markets, health insurance and tax policy in the start-up and survival of entrepreneurial ventures.

Glenn Hubbard was named dean of Columbia Business School on July 1, 2004. A Columbia faculty member since 1988, he is also the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics. Professor Hubbard received his BA and BS degrees summa cum laude from the University of Central Florida, where he received the National Society of Professional Engineers Award. He also holds AM and PhD degrees in economics from Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard, Professor Hubbard began his teaching career at Northwestern University, moving to Columbia in 1988. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Business School as well as the University of Chicago. Professor Hubbard also held the John M. Olin Fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition to writing more than 90 scholarly articles in economics and finance, Professor Hubbard is the author of a leading textbook on money and financial markets. His commentaries have appeared in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Nikkei and the Daily Yomiuri, as well as on television (on PBS’s Nightly Business Report) and radio (on NPR’s Marketplace). In government, Professor Hubbard served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department for Tax Policy from 1991 to –1993. From February 2001 until March 2003, he was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. While serving as CEA chairman, he also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the OECD. In the corporate sector, he is currently a director of ADP, Dex Media, KKR Financial Corporation, and Ripplewood Holdings. Professor Hubbard is married to Constance Pond Hubbard. They live in Manhattan with their two sons.

Dale W. Jorgenson is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. He received a BA in economics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1955 and a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1959. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Harvard faculty in 1969 and was appointed the Frederic Eaton Abbe Professor of Economics in 1980. He served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 1994 to 1997. Jorgenson has been honored with membership in the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1978), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969). He was elected to Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1982), the American Statistical Association (1965), and the Econometric Society (1964). He was awarded honorary doctorates by Uppsala University (1991), the University of Oslo (1991), Keio University (2003), and the University of Mannheim (2004). Jorgenson served as President of the American Economic Association in 2000 and was named a Distinguished Fellow of the Association in 2001. He was a Founding Member of the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy of the National Research Council in 1991 and has served as Chairman of the Board since 1998. He also served as Chairman of Section 54, Economic Sciences, of the National Academy of Sciences from 2000 to 2003 and was President of the Econometric Society in 1987. Jorgenson received the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1971. This Medal is awarded every two years to an economist under forty for excellence in economic research. Jorgenson has conducted groundbreaking research on information technology and economic growth, energy and the environment, tax policy and investment behavior, and applied econometrics. He is the author of 240 articles in economics and the author and editor of twenty-seven books. His collected papers have been published in ten volumes by The MIT Press, beginning in 1995. His most recent book, Information Technology and the American Growth Resurgence, co-authored with Mun Ho and Kevin Stiroh and published by The MIT Press in 2005, represents a major effort to quantify the impact of information technology on the U.S. economy. Another MIT Press volume, Lifting The Burden: Tax Reform, The Cost of Capital, and U.S. Economic Growth, co-authored with Kun-Young Yun in 2001, proposes a new approach to capital income taxation, dubbed “A Smarter Type of Tax” by the Financial Times. Sixty-five economists have collaborated with Jorgenson on published research. An important feature of Jorgenson's research program has been collaboration with students in economics at Berkeley and Harvard. Many of his former students are professors at leading academic institutions in the United States and abroad and several occupy endowed chairs. The MIT Press published Econometrics And The Cost Of Capital, edited by Lawrence J. Lau, in 2000. This contains essays in honor of Jorgenson presented at a conference at Harvard by thirteen of his former students. It also contains his biography, a list of his publications, and a list of his sixty-four Ph.D. thesis advisees at Berkeley and Harvard through 2000.

Kenneth L. Judd is the Paul H. Bauer Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is an expert in the economics of taxation, imperfect competition, and mathematical economics.
His current research focuses on tax policy and antitrust issues, as well as developing computational methods for economic modeling. He was coeditor of the RAND Journal of Economics (1988–95) and associate editor of the Journal of Public Economics (1988–97) and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (1997–2001). He is currently a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2002–) and an associate editor of Computational Economics (1993–). He has published articles in several academic journals including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Economic Theory. His work has also been published in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Political Economy, RAND Journal, Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Theory, Brookings Papers of Economic Activity, and American Economic Review. Judd has contributed chapters to collected volumes including "The Impact of Tax Reform in Modern Dynamic Economies" in Transition Costs of Fundamental Tax Reform (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2001). His book Numerical Methods in Economics was published by MIT Press in 1998. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and served as a member of the Economics Panel of the National Science Foundation (1986–88). Before joining the Hoover Institution as a senior fellow in 1988, Judd was a visiting professor of business economics at the University of Chicago. From 1986 to 1987 he was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution. Judd was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Chicago, Department of Economics, 1980–1981. From 1981 to 1983, he was an assistant professor of managerial economics at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, and from 1984 to 1986 he was an associate professor at Kellogg. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin (1975) with undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer sciences. Judd received an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in mathematics in 1977 and an M.A. in economics in 1980. He was awarded a Ph.D. in economics in 1981 from the University of Wisconsin.

Edward P. Lazear is the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave from his position as The Morris A. Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, which he has held since 1985. He is also the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, where he has taught since 1992. Professor Lazear taught previously at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, where he was the Brown Professor of Urban and Labor Economics. Founding Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and founder of the Society of Labor Economics, Lazear is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the former President of the Society of Labor Economists. Professor Lazear has written extensively on labor markets and personnel issues; microeconomic theory; issues involving worker compensation and effects on productivity; governmental policies on discrimination, affirmative action and comparable worth; educational policy; unemployment; culture, language and diversity issues; the doctrine of employment at will; distribution of income within the household; and pricing and marketing policies. He has over 100 published articles and eight books. Professor Lazear's book Personnel Economics (MIT Press, 1995) expands on his 1993 Wicksell Lectures. In 1998, he received the Melamed Prize, which cited this book as the best research by a business school professor anywhere in the world during the previous two years. He also received the 1994 Distinguished Teaching Award from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and the 2000 Ph.D. Faculty Distinguished Service Award. In 2004, he was awarded the IZA Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Labor Economics. Professor Lazear was a member of President Bush’s Panel on Tax Reform and has been an advisor to the governments of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Russia Ukraine, and Georgia. Born in 1948, Professor Lazear grew up in Los Altos, California. He received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in economics.

Aparna Mathur is a research fellow in economics policy at AEI. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland in 2005 and subsequently joined AEI. Her fields of specialization are applied microeconomics, international finance, and econometrics. Currently, her research focuses on studying trends in corporate taxes across countries using panel data methodology. She also analyzes health policy issues. In particular, the impact of high health care costs on consumer bankruptcy filings and the disproportionate impact of state health insurance mandates on small firms. Aparna has held short term consulting positions at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi, India. She has also taught courses in Microeconomics at the University of Maryland.

Mark Mazur is the Director of Research, Analysis, and Statistics at the Internal Revenue Service. He joined the Service in February 2001, moving from the Department of Energy, where he had been Acting Administrator of the Energy Information Administration (the independent forecasting and analytical arm of the Department of Energy). Mark has served in various positions throughout government, including stints at the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Council of Economic Advisors, and the President’s National Economic Council. Prior to entering public service, Mark was an Assistant Professor at the School of Urban and Public Affairs (now the Heinz School) at Carnegie-Mellon University. Mark has a PhD in Business and a Masters degree in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. in Financial Administration from Michigan State University.

William Randolph is an economist and Senior Analyst for the Tax Analysis Division of the Congressional Budget Office. He served previously as the Director for International Taxation in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis. Dr. Randolph has worked on a wide variety of domestic and international tax policy issues for the U.S. government and has published numerous journal articles in public finance and econometrics. At the Congressional Budget Office, he currently studies the incidence of capital and corporate income taxes.

Joel B. Slemrod is the Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, and Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. He also serves as the Director of the Office of Tax Policy Research. Additionally, he is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Slemrod received the A.B. degree from Princeton University in 1973 and the Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1980. He joined the economics department at the University of Minnesota in 1979. In 1983-84 he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in 1984-85 he was the senior staff economist for tax policy at the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He has been at Michigan since 1987, and was chairman of the Business Economics Group from 1991 to 1992, and from 1995 to 1998. Professor Slemrod was editor of the National Tax Journal from 1992 to 1998, the leading academic journal devoted to the theory and practice of taxation. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Canadian Department of Finance, the New Zealand Department of Treasury, the World Bank, and the OECD and coordinator of the National Bureau of Economic Research project in international taxation. In 1993 he was an invited faculty member at the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Annual Issues Seminar, and has testified before the Congress on domestic and international taxation issues. He is co-author with Jon Bakija of the recently published book on tax policy entitled Taxing Ourselves: A Citizen's Guide to the Great Debate over Tax Reform.

Martin A. Sullivan is a Contributing Editor and economist for Tax Analysts. His prior experience includes working on the staff of the Treasury Department and the Joint Committee on Taxation, and he has worked as an economic consultant in the private sector. In 1995 he authored two books on tax reform published by Wiley & Sons. Since then he has written hundreds of economic analyses for Tax Notes magazine and is frequently quoted in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Business Week.

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