Speaker biographies
Rosanne Altshuler is an associate professor in the Economics Department at Rutgers University. Ms. Altshuler 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 was a senior economist to the President’s Advisory Panel of Federal Tax Reform in 2005. Prior to joining the Tax Reform Panel, she was a special adviser to the Joint Committee on Taxation (2004–2005). Ms. Altshuler has served on the board of directors of the National Tax Association and edited the National Tax Journal from 2001 through 2006. She has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, and New York University’s School.
Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at AEI. Previously the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), where he oversaw SSA’s policy research efforts and led the agency’s participation in the Social Security Trustees working group, Mr. Biggs has investigated the tradeoffs involved in meeting Social Security’s projected budgetary shortfalls. In 2005, he worked on Social Security reform at the White House National Economic Council, and in 2001, he was on the staff of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. At AEI, he draws on micro and macroeconomic analysis, financial and behavioral economics, and research into public opinion and political institutions to analyze reforms to improve the effectiveness and long-term solvency of the Social Security program.
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 adviser 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 for the committee, he served on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Brill began his career in Washington as a research assistant at AEI. He has written on a variety of tax policy issues.
Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI, the William H. Abbott professor of International Business and Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and a senior consultant with CRA International. He has published on employment and wage behavior, worker mobility, job loss, the effects of labor market institutions, business dynamics, industrial organization, economic fluctuations, public policy, and other topics. His research appears in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading scholarly journals. Mr. Davis is the recipient of numerous research grants, including several from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He coedits the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, published by the American Economic Association, and he is an economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.
Mihir A. Desai is a professor of finance and entrepreneurial management areas and the MBA Class of 1961 Fellow at Harvard Business School. Mr. Desai’s research focuses on international corporate and public finance. His academic publications have appeared in several journals, including the Review of Financial Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and the National Tax Journal. He is also the author of International Finance: A Casebook (Wiley, 2006), which features his many case studies on international corporate finance. Mr. Desai is a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) public economics and corporate finance programs and codirector of NBER’s India program. His research has been cited in The Economist, BusinessWeek, the New York Times, and several other publications. His professional experience includes stints at Credit Suisse First Boston and McKinsey & Co. and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations.
Dhammika Dharmapala is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation, on the political economy of congressional budgeting, received the National Tax Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He has been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and a John M. Olin Visiting Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. His research focuses on tax and fiscal policy, with particular emphasis on the effects of corporate and international taxation on the behavior of firms.
John W. Diamond is the Edward A. and Hermena Hancock Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and CEO of Tax Policy Advisers, LLC. He was the principal investigator on a sponsored research project for the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, which examined the economic effects of the tax reform options recommended by the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. Mr. Diamond served on the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation from 2000 to 2004, where he was responsible for modeling the macroeconomic effects of major tax policy changes.
Nada O. Eissa is an associate professor of public policy and economics at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). From 2005 to 2007, she was deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy. Previously, she was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, a national fellow at NBER, a visiting economist at the International Monetary Fund, and a visiting scholar at AEI. Ms. Eissa’s research evaluates the design of tax and transfer policy and its impact on work activity and family formation and the impact of school choice on student performance and public schools. In addition to publications in academic journals, her work has been widely cited in major newspapers and magazines. Ms. Eissa also appears as an economics commentator on Nightly Business Report. She is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and a consultant to the Urban‐Brookings Tax Policy Center. Ms. Eissa has also been a consultant to the World Bank, the Congressional Budget Office, and the U.S. Treasury Department.
Daniel Feenberg is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he has been a member of the public economics program since its inception in 1978. He has taught at Princeton University, held staff positions at the U.S. Treasury, and been a member of the IRS Statistics of Income Division Advisory Panel since 1982. His research interests focus on behavioral effects of the personal income tax system, and he maintains the NBER TAXSIM model of the U.S. income tax system.
Seth Giertz works in the Congressional Budget Office’s Tax Analysis Division, where he examines the effects of taxation on various parts of the economy and how people (and different sources of income) respond to these taxes. While much of his work has focused on the elasticity of taxable income, he has also worked on tax issues related to higher education finance, charitable giving, executive compensation, Social Security, and possible reforms to the U.S. markets for healthcare and health insurance. In 2005, Mr. Giertz was a staff economist for the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. Since 2005, he has been on the board of the Society of Government Economists.
Kenneth P. Green studies public policy with respect to air pollution and climate change, energy and the environment, transportation and the environment, and environmental chemicals as a resident scholar at AEI. His work includes analysis of Canadian environmental policy. He has authored numerous policy studies, newspaper and magazine articles, several encyclopedia entries and book chapters, and a textbook for middle-school students titled Global Warming: Understanding the Debate (Enslow Publishers, 2002). Mr. Green has worked on both U.S. and Canadian policy, first at California’s Reason Foundation, then for nearly three years at British Columbia’s Fraser Institute.
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 Columbia Business School. 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 during the 2000 presidential 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 Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press, 2005). He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. Mr. Hassett’s 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, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company specializing in financial planning software. From 1977 to 1983 he served on the faculties of economics of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University. In 1981–82, he was a senior economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Kotlikoff has been a consultant to several financial and governmental institutions and corporations. He has provided expert testimony on numerous occasions to committees of Congress, including the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee. Mr. Kotlikoff is the author or coauthor of eleven books and hundreds of professional journal articles. His most recent book is Spend ’Til the End: The Revolutionary Guide to Raising Your Living Standard Today and When You Retire (with Scott Burns; Simon & Schuster, 2006). Mr. Kotlikoff publishes extensively in newspapers and magazines on issues of deficits, generational accounting, the tax structure, social security, Medicare, health reform, pensions, saving, insurance, and personal finance.
Gilbert E. Metcalf is a professor of Economics at Tufts University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has taught at Princeton University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and has been a visiting scholar at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a consultant to various organizations, including the Chinese Ministry of Finance, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Argonne National Laboratory. Mr. Metcalf’s primary research area is applied public finance, with particular interests in taxation, energy, and environmental economics. His current research focuses on policy evaluation and design in the area of energy and climate change. He has published papers in numerous academic journals, edited two books, and contributed chapters to several books on tax policy.
Douglas A. Shackelford is the Meade H. Willis Distinguished Professor of Taxation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He created and directs the UNC Tax Center and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an international research fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation. His research and teaching address taxes, accounting, and business strategy. He has published widely in accounting, economics, and finance journals.
Matthew D. Shapiro is the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics and a research professor at the University of Michigan. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Shapiro’s general area of research is macroeconomics. He has carried out research on investment and capital utilization, business-cycle fluctuations, consumption and saving, financial markets, fiscal policy, monetary policy, time-series econometrics, and survey methodology. During 1993–94, Mr. Shapiro was a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was also a junior staff economist at the council during 1979–80. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1989, he was an assistant professor of economics at Yale and a member of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. Mr. Shapiro coedited the American Economic Review from 1997 to 2000. He was chair of the Michigan economics department from 2003 to 2007. Mr. Shapiro is currently chair of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee and a member of the Academic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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 Joint Committee on Taxation. Mr. Viard has written on a wide variety of tax and budget issues.
Roberton Williams is a tenured associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he has held visiting research positions at the Brookings Institution and Stanford University. His research focuses on taxation and environmental regulation and has examined a range of specific issues, including gasoline taxation and climate change policy.
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