Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(119,221)
- Faculty Publications (106)
- Book Review
Review of Global Tax Fairness edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta
This timely volume (Global Tax Fairness, edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta) on the proper taxation of multinational enterprises argues that several feasible, near-term reforms could substantially narrow the scope for tax avoidance by closing information gaps,... View Details
- Article
Space, the Final Economic Frontier
After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and U.S. policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. NASA garnered more than 0.7% of GDP in the mid-1960s but is only around 0.1% of GDP... View Details
- December 2017 (Revised January 2025)
- Course Overview Note
Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE)
- December 2017 (Revised November 2023)
- Technical Note
The BGIE Twenty (2024 version)
By: Alberto Cavallo, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons and Matthew Weinzierl
The purpose of this technical note is to explain the BGIE Twenty, an “idea-kit” that serves as the intellectual backbone of the BGIE course. Each year, the BGIE professors decide on the twenty ideas that we believe are the most important for students to study in... View Details
- Article
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. When expressing their preferences over allocations in stylized, hypothetical scenarios meant to isolate key... View Details
- April 2017
- Case
Planetary Resources Inc., Property Rights, and the Regulation of the Space Economy
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Angela Acocella
Planetary Resources, Inc. (PRI) had a bold, some said crazy, vision: to mine asteroids. One might have assumed that developing the right technology would be the greatest challenge facing PRI. But even if the fledgling company could develop and deploy the sophisticated... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
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... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised February 2025)
- Course Overview Note
The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME)
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
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... View Details
- March 2016
- Module Note
Government Policy and Distributive Justice
This note introduces the second of two main modules in the HBS elective curriculum course, The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME). This module is focused on policies, such as taxes, that change the distribution of economic outcomes. Like the... View Details
- Article
Optimal Taxation When Children's Abilities Depend on Parents' Resources
By: Alexander Gelber and Matthew Weinzierl
Empirical research suggests that parents' economic resources affect their children's future earnings abilities. Optimal tax policy therefore treats future ability distributions as endogenous to current taxes. We model this endogeneity, calibrate the model to match... View Details
- February 2016
- Teaching Note
Astroscale, Space Debris, and Earth's Orbital Commons
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Astroscale, Space Debris, and Earth's Orbital Commons
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Angela Acocella and Mayuka Yamazaki
An engineer and technology entrepreneur, Nobu Okada, had turned a mid-life crisis into a bold—some would say quixotic—quest to prevent a tragedy of the commons at the global scale. Namely, Okada believed the accumulation of debris in near-Earth orbital space posed a... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Teaching Note
Blue Origin, NASA, and New Space
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Blue Origin, NASA, and New Space (A)
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Angela Acocella
Jeff Bezos, six years after starting a revolution in retailing with Amazon.com, turned his life-long passion for space into a start-up, Blue Origin. Blue (as it was called) was a part of the New Space industry, a collection of startup aerospace engineering companies... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a... View Details
- November 2015 (Revised November 2021)
- Technical Note
A Simple Graphical Framework for Use in The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME)
- November 2015
- Teaching Note
Equality of Opportunity and Outcome in the U.S.
- November 2015 (Revised November 2015)
- Teaching Note