Speaker biographies

Alex Brill is a research fellow at AEI. Prior to joining AEI earlier this year, he served for five years on the staff of the House Ways and Means Committee, where he was chief economist and senior advisor to the chairman. In this capacity, he led the staff in work on major tax, pension, trade, and health legislation, and oversaw efforts to expand the analytical capability of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s revenue-estimating process. In addition to providing legislative and policy counsel to the chairman, Mr. Brill advised committee members about the effects of various tax, trade, health, and Social Security proposals, and general economic trends. Prior to his work at Ways and Means, he served on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and began his career in Washington as a research assistant at AEI. He has written on a variety of tax policy issues.

Walter Hellerstein is the Francis Shackelford Professor of Taxation at the University of Georgia Law School. Mr. Hellerstein has written and practiced extensively in the state tax field, and he has been involved in numerous state tax cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including successful arguments in Hunt-Wesson, Inc. v. Franchise Tax Bd. and Allied-Signal, Inc. v. Director, Division of Taxation. He is coauthor of the two-volume treatise State Taxation (Warren Gorham & Lamont, 3rd ed., updated semi-annually), and the casebook State and Local Taxation (West Publishing Co., 8th ed., 2005). He has also written more than ninety articles on state taxation that have appeared in leading law reviews and other jour¬nals. Mr. Hellerstein serves as an academic advisor to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and is a member of the board of trustees of the American Tax Policy Institute. He is chairman of the advisory board of State Tax Notes and editor of the State and Local Tax Department of the Journal of Taxation. Hellerstein is a member of the American Law Institute, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and New York bars, and of counsel to the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan.

Gerard J. Lian is executive director and senior analyst in the Morgan Stanley/Van Kampen Tax-Exempt Mutual Fund Group. He concentrates in tobacco bonds, public power bonds, investor owned utilities, project financings, water and sewer bonds, resource recovery projects, airport bonds, airline special facility debt, and other corporate credits. Mr. Lian also engages in distressed loan workouts and focuses on high-yield bonds in these sectors. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Advisors, Mr. Lian worked as a municipal bond attorney with Wood & Dawson, Esqs., a national bond counsel firm, and spent seven years as a senior municipal analyst with American Express. His publications include “The Cost-Effectiveness of Capitalized Interest by Municipal Utilities,” which appeared in the Municipal Finance Journal. He is a member of the New York State Bar Association as well as the Municipal Forum of New York. Mr. Lian is former chairman of the Municipal Analysts Group of New York. He has also been active with the National Federation of Municipal Analysts, has served on its board of governors since 2000, and was elected chairman for 2004.

Alan D. Viard is a resident scholar at AEI. Prior to joining AEI, he was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University. He has also worked for the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Mr. Viard has written on a wide variety of tax and budget issues.

View Event Details