Bill Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions, and saving behavior. He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.

Gale is the author of Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has served as president of the National Tax Association and vice president of Brookings and director of the Economic Studies Program. He has also been an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

Our student quote is read by Emily Eskin, from Teaneck, NJ.

Resources:

1. Bill Gale’s bio.
2. Bill Gale’s tweets.
3. Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future.
4. The pencil question is about I.R.C. § 6033 (returns by exempt organizations).
5. The student quote is from: Bridget J. Crawford & Emily Gold Waldman, The Unconstitutional Tampon Tax, 53 U. Rich. L. Rev. 439 (2019).

She writes about information exchange, tax leaks, international tax relations, sharing economy and human equity transactions, and ethics in international tax. Ring was a consultant for the United Nation’s 2014 project on tax base protection for developing countries, and the UN's 2013 project on treaty administration for developing countries. Ring is also co-author of three case books in taxation. Before entering academia, Ring practiced at the firm of Caplin & Drysdale and clerked for Judge Jon O. Newman of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Our student quote is read by Sebastian from Whiting, New Jersey.

Resources:

1. Professor Ring’s bio.
2. Dan Shaviro’s blog post about Ring’s recent visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
3. Shu-Yi Oei & Diane M. Ring, The Tax Lives of Uber Drivers: Evidence from Internet Discussion Forums, 8 Colum. J. Tax L. 56 (2017).
4. Shu-Yi Oei & Diane Ring, Leak-Driven Law, 65 UCLA L. Rev. 532 (2018).
5. More of Ring’s scholarship.
6. The pencil question is from “When I Squeeze You with Eisphorai”: Taxes and Tax Policy in Classical Athens by Peter Fawcett
7. The source for the student quote.

Stanford Law School’s Joe Bankman writes on tax policy topics such as progressivity, consumption tax, and the role of tax in the structure of Silicon Valley start-ups. He has gained wide attention for his work on how government might control the use of tax shelters and has testified before Congress and other legislative bodies on tax compliance problems posed by the cash economy. He has written and spoken extensively on how we might use technology to simplify filing. He also worked with the State of California to create ReadyReturn—a completed tax return prepared by the state that is available to low-income and middle-income taxpayers.

Our student quote is read by Philip Wolf.

Resources:

1. Professor Bankman’s bio.
2. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about his recent visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
3. Bankman’s scholarship
4. Bankman’s podcast about wellness in the legal profession.
5. Collecting the Rent: The Global Battle to Capture MNE Profits (with Mitchell Kane & Alan O. Sykes) 72 Tax Law Review 197 (2019).
6. More about the ReadyReturn.
7. The student quote comes a Tax Notes article written by the student who read it!
8. The pencil question is from Learning to Love the Form 1040: Two Cheers For The Return-Based Mass Income Tax.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is the director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor at the university. From 2015-2017, she was the director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative housed at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, and a nonresident senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

Whitmore Schanzenbach studies issues related to child poverty, including education policy, child health, and food consumption. Much of her research investigates the longer-run impacts of early life experiences, such as the impacts of receiving SNAP benefits during childhood, the impacts of kindergarten classroom quality, and the impacts of early childhood education. She recently served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Examination of the Adequacy of Food Resources and SNAP Allotments.

This conversation was recorded in 2019. Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Diane has been researching the effects of the pandemic on food insecurity in real time. She also has created an app with an IPR summer undergraduate research assistant that tracks measures of food insecurity across all 50 states.

Our student quote is read by Aly Mariani.

Resources:

1. Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach’s bio.
2. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about her recent visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
3. Read some of Schanzenbach's blog posts.
4. Selections of Schanzenbach’s research
5. Follow Schanzenbach on Twitter: @dwschanz.
6. The student quote comes from Michael Graetz’s 2001 Erwin Griswold Lecture for the American College of Tax Counsel.

Marc Fleurbaey is the Research Director of the National Center for Scientific Research at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare (2008), a co-author of Beyond GDP (with Didier Blanchet, 2013), A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare (with François Maniquet, 2011), and the coeditor of several books, including Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls (with Maurice Salles and John Weymark, 2008) and the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy (with Matthew Adler, 2016). His research on normative and public economics and theories of distributive justice has focused in particular on the analysis of equality of opportunity, risk, redistributive taxation, climate policy, and on seeking solutions to famous impossibilities of social choice theory.   

Our student quote is read by Rita Halabi. 

Resources

1. Marc Fleurbaey’s bio and website
2. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about Pratt’s recent visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
3. Do You Believe in Democracy or in Equality — or Both?
4. Beyond GDP: The Quest for a Measure of Social Welfare
5. To learn more about Zarin, read Daniel Shaviro, “The Man Who Lost Too Much: Zarin v. Commissioner and the Measurement of Taxable Consumption”, 45 Tax L. Rev. 215 (1990)
6. The student quote comes from Peracchi v. Commissioner, 143 F.3d 487 (9th Cir. 1998).

Professor Katie Pratt is Loyola Law School’s Sayre Macneil Fellow. She is an expert in income taxation and tax policy, and the co-author of a popular textbook on income tax. She writes on the intersection of tax law and population health, tax expenditures and federal budget issues, with the goal of improving policy. Focusing on what she calls “scholarship with a heart,” Pratt explores the consequences of tax policies on health issues affecting wide swaths of the population. Her work is uniquely interdisciplinary: a member of the American Public Health Association as well as the National Tax Association, she studies and writes about the use of taxes on soda and junk food to control obesity, as well as the tax treatment of medical expenses for gender reassignment and fertility treatments.   

Our student quote is read by Alex Pettingell from New York, NY and is by Martin D. Ginsburg. The quote is from testimony Ginsburg offered to the Senate Finance Committee noting that the now-repealed § 341 contained a single sentence longer than the entire Gettysburg Address.

Resources

1. Katie Pratt’s bio
2. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about Pratt’s recent visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
3. Lessons from the Demise of the Sugary Drink Portion Cap Rule, 5 Wake Forest J. L. & Pol’y 39 (2014)
4. Inconceivable? Deducting the Costs of Fertility Treatment," 89 Cornell L. Rev. 101 (2004)
5. Ted Seto & Sande Buhai, Tax and Disability: Ability to Pay and the Taxation of Difference, 154 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1053 (2006) 
6. Lisa C. Ikemoto, The In/Fertile, the Too Fertile, and the Dysfertile, 47 Hastings L.J. 1007 (1996).
7. Jonathan Gruber and Botond Köszegi, A Modern Economic View of Tobacco Taxation International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (2008)

Zachary Liscow is an associate professor of law at Yale Law School. His main research interest is understanding the appropriate policy levers to address income inequality and, in particular, the role that tax policy versus other legal rules should play. He also works in a variety of other areas, including urban economics, environmental policy, and empirical legal studies. Liscow earned his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his JD from Yale Law School. He has been a staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and worked for the World Bank's inspector general. 

Our student quote is by Rebecca Arnall from New York, NY.

Resources:

1. Professor Liscow’s bio.
2. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about Liscow’s visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium.
3. Is Efficiency Biased? 85 University of Chicago Law Review 1649 (2018)
4. The pencil question: Thomas J. Brennan, Perils of Partial Mark-to-Market Taxation.  
5. The student quote is: "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing."—Jean Baptist Colbert

Stacie Laplante is an associate professor of accounting and information systems and the James L. Henderson Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business. Laplante has nine years of experience in public accounting industry as a certified public accountant. Her research focuses on the intersection of financial and tax reporting and is particularly interested in information related to tax reporting that is reflected in firms’ publicly available financial statements and what the information reveals about the firm’s tax-planning strategies, as well as how the market uses or values that information.

Our student quote is by Stephanie Tapp from Bountiful, Utah.

Resources

1. Professor Laplante’s bio.
2. Gaertner, F. & Laplante, S. & Lynch, D. (2016). Trends in the Sources of Permanent and Temporary Book-Tax Differences during the Schedule M-3 Era, National Tax Journal
3. Laplante, S. & Klassen, K. (2012). Are U.S. Multinational Companies Becoming More Aggressive Income Shifters?, Journal of Accounting Research
4. Laplante, S. & Klassen, K. (2012). The Effect of Foreign Reinvestment and Financial Reporting Incentives on Cross-Jurisdictional Income Shifting, Contemporary Accounting Research
5. Laplante, S. (2008). Discussion of Taxes and Asset Prices: The Case of Thoroughbreds, Journal of the American Taxation Association
6. The pencil question: Ajay K. Mehrotra, The Myth of the “Overtaxed” American and the VAT That Never Was, Information, Modern American History (March 2019).
7. The student quote is from Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) in the movie The Firm.

Allison Christians is associate dean for research and the H. Heward Stikeman Chair in the Law of Taxation at the McGill University Faculty of Law. Her research and teaching focus on national and international tax law and policy issues, with emphasis on the relationship between taxation and economic development and on the role of government and non-government institutions and actors in the creation of tax policy norms.

Christians is the author of ‘The Big Picture,’ a column for Tax Analysts’ Tax Notes International and regularly comments on developments in international tax law and policy on her blog and on Twitter as @profchristians. She has been awarded the John Durnford Prize in Teaching Excellence and the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She was named among the International Tax Review’s "Global Tax 50" in both 2015 and 2016 for her influence and impact on taxation, and in 2018 was identified by Economia as one of the top 50 most influential sources of finance news and information in social media.

Our student quote is by Kris from Livingston, NJ

Resources

1. Professor Christians’ bio.
2. Taxing Income Where Value is Created, 22 Fla. Tax Rev. 1 (2019), with Laurens Van Apeldoorn.
3. The pencil question article: Dana Brakman Reiser, Nonprofit Takeovers: Regulating the Market for Mission Control, 2006 BYU L. Rev. 1181 (2006).  
4. The student quote is taken from Randolph E. Paul, The Responsibilities of the Tax Adviser, 63 Harv. L. Rev. 377 (1950).

Zelenak is the Pamela B. Gann Professor of Law at Duke Law and the author of Figuring Out the Tax: Congress, Treasury, and the Design of the Early Modern Income Tax (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Learning to Love Form 1040: Two Cheers for the Return-Based Mass Income Tax (University of Chicago Press, 2013), countless articles and “The Great American Tax Novel”, a review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. In addition to his work as a scholar, Zelenak served as a professor in residence at the Office of the Chief Counsel, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, DC. 

Zelenak likes tax. A lot. He also likes writing. That enthusiasm shines through in all of his work.From finding surprising views in letters dating from the Coolidge Administration to exploring “philosophies of tax administration” in a contemporary novel, Zelenak’s eye for what matters makes him one of the most important voices in tax law. His willingness to engage not just archival resources and great works of literature but also with classic TV sitcoms guarantees that a conversation with him will go to unexpected places. 

Resources

1. Larry Zelenak’s bio.
2. The two books by Zelenak we discuss: Figuring Out the Tax and Learning to Love Form 1040.  
3. Zelenak’s review of David Foster Wallace’s book The Pale King.
4. The pencil question article is Richard A. Musgrave, Pathway to Tax Reform, 98 Harv. L. Rev. 335 (1984) (written in memory of Stanley Surrey, Author of Pathways to Tax Reform”)  
5. The student quote is taken from Commissioner v. Tufts, 461 U.S. 300 (1983).

Professor Wei Cui teaches at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. He also practiced tax law for over 10 years in both New York and Beijing, served as senior tax counsel for the China Investment Corporation and has served as a consultant to the United Nations, the Budgetary Affairs Commission of China’s National People’s Congress, and China’s Ministry of Finance and State Administration of Taxation.

Cui has been at the forefront of the effort to understand the opportunities and perils presented by the fast-moving effort to tax digital giants such as Facebook and Google. He explains how his focus on digital taxes grew out of a last-minute scramble to find a topic after a shift in the political winds rendered another moot. The result has been good for him and great for all of us as he has added much-needed light to a heated debate that at times has threatened to escalate into a trans-Atlantic trade war. 

Cui also discusses his controversial work on third-party information reporting. He has questioned the importance scholars and policymakers often place on information as a source of strength for tax systems in developed economies. He makes a compelling case that the link between the two has long been misunderstood.

Our student quote by Aaron from College Station, Texas.

Resources

1. Professor Cui’s bio.
2. Dan Shaviro’s  blog post about Cui’s visit to the NYU Law Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium.
3. The paper Cui presented at the Colloquium, The Digital Services Tax: A Conceptual Defense
4. Cui’s paper questioning the value of information reporting.  
5. Leandra Lederman’s response.
6. The student quote is taken from John Marshall’s opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316, 431 (1819).