Alan J. Auerbach is the Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, director of the Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and former chair of the economics department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously taught at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, where he also served as economics department chair. Professor Auerbach was deputy chief of staff of the U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation in 1992 and has been a consultant to several government agencies and institutions in the United States and abroad. A former vice president of the American Economic Association, he was editor of that association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives and is now editor of its new American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Professor Auerbach is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Joseph Bankman is a leading scholar in the field of tax law and the author of two widely used casebooks on the subject. His writings on tax policy cover 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 worked with the state of California, coauthoring a bill that helps simplify tax filing by giving low-income taxpayers the option of receiving a ReadyReturn—a completed tax return prepared by the state. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1989, Professor Bankman was a professor at the University of Southern California Law Center and a tax practitioner with the Los Angeles firm of Tuttle & Taylor.
Jane G. Gravelle is currently a senior specialist in economic policy in the government and finance division of CRS. She specializes in the economics of taxation, particularly the effects of tax policies on economic growth and resource allocation. Recent papers have addressed consumption taxes, dynamic revenue estimating, investment subsidies, capital gains taxes, individual retirement accounts, estate and gift taxes, family tax issues, charitable contributions, and corporate taxation. In addition to her work at CRS, she is the author of numerous articles in books and professional journals, including recent papers on the tax burdens across families and tax reform proposals. She is the author of The Economic Effects of Taxing Capital Income and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy. She is the editor of the Tax Expenditure Compendium, published every two years by the Senate Budget Committee. She is past president of the National Tax Association.
Daniel Halperin is the Stanley S. Surrey Professor at the Harvard Law School. After beginning his career in private practice in New York, Professor Halperin served in the Treasury Department from 1967 to 1970. After seven years as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he returned to the Treasury Department, first as tax legislative counsel and then as deputy assistant secretary for tax legislation. Professor Halperin was a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center for 15 years before coming to Harvard in 1996. He was also a visiting professor at both Yale and Harvard Law Schools. Professor Halperin has written numerous articles in the area of tax law and policy.
Edward D. Kleinbard is a partner at international law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Widely recognized as a leading tax lawyer in the United States, he is consistently listed in The International Who’s Who of Corporate Tax Lawyers, International Tax Review’s “World Tax” yearbook, Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business, and Chambers Global The World’s Leading Lawyers. His practice focuses on federal income tax matters, including taxation of new financial products, financial institutions, and international mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Kleinbard regularly publishes on tax matters and is an adjunct professor at Yale Law School. Mr. Kleinbard has testified before several congressional committees and the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.
Paul W. Oosterhuis is a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates and coordinator of the international tax practice. He represents clients on a wide range of international and domestic tax matters, including international mergers and acquisitions, post-acquisition integration transactions, spin-off transactions, internal restructurings, and joint venture transactions. Mr. Oosterhuis has regularly been selected for inclusion in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business and has been consistently rated one of the top tax lawyers in Washington, D.C., by the Chambers and Partners Global Survey. He is the author of several publications on international and corporate tax law. He was a legislation attorney and legislation counsel for the Joint Committee on Taxation and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.
Edmund Outslay is a professor of accounting and the Deloitte/Michael Licata Teaching Fellow in the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University. His primary teaching and research interests are in accounting for income taxes, international taxation, and mergers and acquisitions. He has published numerous articles in journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of the American Taxation Association, and the National Tax Journal and is a coauthor of the text, U.S. Tax Aspects of Doing Business Abroad. In February 2003, he testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the Joint Committee on Taxation Report on Enron Corporation.
George A. Plesko is an associate professor of accounting at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT, and has also served on the faculties of the MIT Sloan School of Management, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the International Tax Program at the Harvard Law School, and Northeastern University. Plesko's research focuses on corporate tax policy, the interactions of financial and tax reporting, the characteristics and magnitude of book-tax differences, and the behavior of loss firms. His research has appeared in The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, and the National Tax Journal, and he has testified before the Senate Finance Committee on corporate tax policy issues. His 2003 National Tax Journal paper with Lillian Mills, “Bridging the Reporting Gap: A Proposal for More Informative Reconciling of Book and Tax Income,” was awarded the 2005 American Accounting Association / Deloitte Wildman Medal. He is a member of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council’s Tax Gap Subgroup, the Statistics of Income Consulting Panel, and has been an advisor to tax reform projects for the states of Massachusetts and Maine.
Julie A. Roin is the Seymour Logan Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She teaches both federal income tax and state and local finance courses. Her primary research interest is federal income taxation, in particular its treatment of transnational transactions. She is the author of a number of law journal articles and the coauthor, with Paul Stephan and Don Wallace, Jr., of a casebook entitled International Business and Economics—Law and Policy.
Kim Rueben is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center, where she currently heads up the state policy effort, and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. She has recently completed studies on California’s infrastructure financing system, an evaluation of the impact of changing federal deductibility of state and local taxes, an examination of the economic effects of Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights Law, and an evaluation of states’ fiscal capacity. She was a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, an adjunct professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she is now an adjunct fellow.
Michael L. Schler is a tax partner in the New York City law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. He practices in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, corporate tax, consolidated returns, financial products, and asset-bracket securitization. He was chair of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section from 1994 to 1995, and has been a member of the executive committee since 1985. He is a trustee and the vice president of the American Tax Policy Institute. He is the chair of the New York Tax Forum and a member of the American College of Tax Counsel. He has been a consultant to the American Law Institute Federal Income Tax Project on Integration of the Individual and Corporate Income Taxes, and to the Institute’s Project on Taxation of Private Business Enterprises. He is the author of numerous published articles in the tax field, a speaker at numerous tax conferences, and the cochair of the annual UCLA Mergers and Acquisitions tax conference.
Reed Shuldiner is the Alvin L. Snowiss Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he has taught since 1990. He has been a visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Yale Law School. Prior to Penn, he served as an attorney advisor in the Office of Tax Legislative Counsel at the Treasury Department (1986 to 1989). He was an associate with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering (1984 to 1986) and a counsel with Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft (1989 to 1990). He has acted as an adviser to foreign governments on behalf of the Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of numerous articles on the taxation of capital.
Joel Slemrod is the Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, professor of economics in the department of economics, and director of the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan. He joined the economics department at the University of Minnesota in 1979. From 1983 to 1984, he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and from 1984 to 1985, he was the senior staff economist for tax policy at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has been at Michigan since 1987. From 1992 to 1998, Professor Slemrod was editor of the National Tax Journal, and between 2005 and 2006, he was president of the National Tax Association. He is coauthor with Jon Bakija of Taxing Ourselves: A Citizen’s Guide to the Debate over Taxes, soon to be in its fourth edition.
Joseph J. Thorndike is director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts and a contributing editor for Tax Notes magazine. He is the author of numerous articles on tax history and policy, coeditor (with Dennis J. Ventry, Jr.) of Tax Justice: The Ongoing Debate (Urban Institute Press, 2002) and coauthor (with Steven Bank and Kirk Stark) of War and Taxes (Urban Institute Press, forthcoming). He is currently writing a history of tax fairness and social justice during the Great Depression and World War II.
Eric Toder is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and the Urban–Brookings Tax Policy Center, where he specializes in retirement policy and tax policy issues. Between 2001 and 2004, he served as director, National Headquarters Office of Research, at the Internal Revenue Service. Dr. Toder previously held a number of positions in tax policy offices in the U.S. government and overseas, including deputy assistant secretary for Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, deputy assistant director for Tax Analysis at the Congressional Budget Office, and consultant to the New Zealand Treasury.
David A. Weisbach is the Walter J. Blum Professor and director of the Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. He previously held positions at Georgetown University Law Center, the Office of Tax Policy in the Treasury Department, and in private law practice. He is the author of numerous articles on taxation and was a consultant to the President’s Commission on Tax Reform in 2005. His current research interests include the differences between income and consumption taxation, the structure of the corporate tax, tax expenditures, and the use of taxation for redistribution with respect to factors other than income (such as disability).
George R. Zodrow is professor of economics and Rice Scholar, Baker Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University. He also holds an appointment as International Research Fellow at the Centre on Business Taxation at Oxford University. His research interests are tax reform in the United States and in developing countries and state and local public finance, and his articles have appeared in numerous publications and books on taxation. Professor Zodrow is currently editor of the National Tax Journal and recently served as the editor of the “Policy Watch” section of International Tax and Public Finance. He is the author of State Sales and Income Taxes and the coeditor of Fundamental Tax Reform: Issues, Choices and Implications and United States Tax Reform in the 21st Century. He was a visiting economist at the U.S. Treasury Office of Tax Analysis from 1984 to 1985 and has participated in tax reform projects in numerous countries.
