Rudolph G. Penner is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and holds the Arjay and Frances Miller chair in public policy. Previously, he was a managing director of the Barents Group, a KPMG company. He was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1983 to 1987. From 1977 to 1983, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Previous posts in government include assistant director for Economic Policy at the Office of Management and Budget, deputy assistant secretary for Economic Affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. Before 1975, Penner was a professor of economics at the University of Rochester.
He was elected president of the American Tax Policy Institute in 2005 and is past president of the National Economists Club. In 1989, he received the Abramson Prize for the best article published in 1988-1989 in Business Economics and more recently received a prize for the best article published in 2002 in Public Budgeting and Finance. In 2004, he chaired the Commission on Metro Financing for the Washington Metropolitan Area Council of Governments and others and is currently chairing the Committee on the Future of the Fuel Tax for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences.
He is the author of numerous books, pamphlets and articles on tax and spending policy and has authored columns for various newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. His most recent book, co-authored with Isabel Sawhill and Timothy Taylor, is Updating America's Social Contract (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).
Penner's undergraduate degree is from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. in economics is from the Johns Hopkins University.
