Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration
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
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it too limited, for us to fully trace a policy's effects on welfare. Nonwelfarist principles can be valuable to a welfarist facing this limitation if they act as informational proxies, carrying accumulated knowledge about the effects of policy that otherwise cannot be considered. I also provide evidence of an example in which real-world policy judgments are consistent with this theoretical argument. Results from a novel U.S. opinion survey show that approximately half of respondents reject redistribution driven by envy even though it generates direct utilitarian gains.
U.S. survey respondents’ views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization of inequality due to brute luck that standard analyses would recommend. Related, a similar share prefer a classical benefit-based logic for the assignment of taxes over the conventional logic of diminishing marginal social welfare. Moreover, these two views are linked: respondents who more strongly resist equalization are more likely to prefer the classical benefit-based principle. Together, these results suggest that a large share of the American public views the allocation of pre-tax incomes as relevant to optimal tax policy and—at least in part—justly deserved unless proven otherwise, judgments that are inconsistent with standard welfarist objectives.
This paper explores how the persistently popular "classical" logic of benefit based taxation, in which an individual's benefit from public goods is tied to his or her income-earning ability, can be incorporated into modern optimal tax theory. If Lindahl's methods are applied to that view of benefits, first-best optimal policy can be characterized analytically as depending on a few potentially estimable statistics, in particular the coefficient of complementarity between public goods and innate talent. Constrained optimal policy with a Pareto-efficient objective that strikes a balance-controlled by a single parameterñbetween this principle and the familiar utilitarian criterion can be simulated using conventional constraints and methods. A wide range of optimal policy outcomes can result, including those consistent with existing policies. To the extent that such an objective reflects the mixed normative reasoning behind prevailing policies, this model may offer a useful approach to a positive optimal tax theory.
Industry is looking to the stars for a new commercial frontier. NASA is looking to industry to help broaden the scope of space exploration. What does this interplay mean for the the New Space sector?
