Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration Chair, MBA Required Curriculum
Matt Weinzierl is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, in particular taxation, with an emphasis on better understanding the philosophical principles underlying policy choices. Recently, he has launched a set of research projects focused on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications. He serves on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Tax Expenditure Commission, the board of the National Tax Association, and on the editorial boards of Social Choice and Welfare and National Tax Journal. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2008, Professor Weinzierl served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.
Matt Weinzierl is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, in particular taxation, with an emphasis on better understanding the philosophical principles underlying policy choices. Recently, he has launched a set of research projects focused on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications. He also serves on the editorial boards of Social Choice and Welfare and National Tax Journal. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2008, Professor Weinzierl served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.
Professor Weinzierl has written on a range of topics in optimal taxation and optimal economic policy more generally. His most recent projects, associated with the idea of Positive Optimal Tax Theory, focus on identifying and formalizing the goals for tax policy that hold sway among the public, political and economic leaders, and leading tax thinkers, and then characterizing the implications of using those objectives in the analysis of optimal taxation. In other work, he has explored the potential value of age-dependent taxation, the dynamic feedback effects of tax changes, the use of fiscal policy to counteract recessions, the proper price-indexing of Social Security, and the impact of differences in beliefs and tastes across individuals on optimal tax design.His research has been published in Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Journals: Economic Policy, Journal of Monetary Economics, Economic Journal, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, National Tax Journal, and Journal of Economic Perspectives, and has been discussed in the Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.In 2008, he was selected to participate in the Review of Economic Studies tour.
Professor Weinzierl serves as Course Head for the required first-year course Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE). He is also the creator of an elective course at HBS entitled "The Role of Government in Market Economies," or RoGME. For that course, he has written case studies on public education, national health insurance, welfare reform, immigration, and a variety of topics in taxation. Professor Weinzierl also serves as the Chair of MBA Community Standards and the Conduct Review Board at HBS, overseeing the Community Values that inform and support daily life at the School.
Recently, Professor Weinzierl launched a set of research projects focused on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications. He has authored case studies for the classroom on Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, Astroscale, and other companies and topics within the commercial space sector, and has published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives introducing academic economists to key economic aspects of the commercialization of human activities in space.
Professor Weinzierl is married to Coventry Edwards-Pitt, an author of books on how affluent families can use their resources to pursue meaningful and healthy relationships and lives. Their family lives in the western suburbs of Boston and spends its free time enjoying music, the outdoors, and ice cream.
Designing, not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation (in progress)
(with Benjamin B. Lockwood)
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness–for the purposes of policy making and evaluation–is to design policy that takes these ranges into account. We modify the standard optimal income tax model to include uncertainty over parameter values and characterize robust optimal policy as that which maximizes expected social welfare. After calibrating uncertainty over the elasticity of taxable income from past empirical work and novel survey data on economists' beliefs, we compare the implied robust optimal marginal tax rates to two benchmarks: a probability-weighted average of optimal policies computed for each possible set of parameter values, and the optimal policy based on the best estimates of them. Click to here to take the survey
Understanding Different Approaches to Benefit-Based Taxation
The normative principle of benefit-based taxation has exerted substantial influence on many areas of public finance, but it has been largely set aside in the modern theoretical approach to optimal income taxation, where welfarist objectives dominate. A prerequisite for that gap to close is the clarification of what benefit-based income taxation would mean, specifically in a first-best setting. This paper seeks to provide clear, accessible descriptions and novel graphical representations of four major approaches to first-best benefit-based taxation, explain how these approaches relate to each other, and apply them within the classical benefit-based framework for optimal income taxation of Smith (1776).
The Final Economic Frontier
After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and US policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. The shift from public to private priorities in space is especially significant because a widely shared goal among commercial space’s leaders is the achievement of a large-scale, largely self-sufficient, developed space economy. In this article, I provide an analytical framework—based on classic economic analysis of the role of government in market economies—for understanding and managing the development of the space economy. That framework has three components: 1) establishing the market through decentralization of decision making and financing for human space activities; 2) refining the market through policies that address market failures and ensure a healthy market structure; and 3) tempering the market through regulation in pursuit of social objectives.
