Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(608)
- Faculty Publications (86)
- Winter 2014
- Article
Labor Regulations and European Venture Capital
By: Ant Bozkaya and William R. Kerr
European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g., unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice
A prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is Utilitarian. I present new survey evidence that most people disagree with this assumption, preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective: the... View Details
- February 2014 (Revised August 2015)
- Case
The Estate Tax Debate
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Katrina Flanagan and Valerie Galinskaya
Per dollar of revenue, no tax policy generates more sound and fury than the taxation of estates. To supporters, the tax is a break on the concentration of wealth and power and an easy way to fund redistribution. To opponents, the tax is an unjust punishment of the... View Details
- November 2013 (Revised February 2016)
- Case
A Long, Bumpy and Unfinished Road: Education Reform in Memphis, Tennessee
By: Allen Grossman, J. Puckett and Nithya Vaduganathan
In 2010 the Memphis City School District merged with the neighboring Shelby County School system under the supervision of a single board of education and superintendent. It promised much more than just administrative synergies—it was an opportunity to change a... View Details
- 2013
- Government Testimony
American Competitiveness Worldwide: Impacts on Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs
The Committee on Small Business Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Tax and Capital Access held a hearing titled, "American Competitiveness Worldwide: Impacts on Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs." Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter spoke at the hearing,... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Innovation, Reallocation and Growth
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Nicholas Bloom and William R. Kerr
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the... View Details
- 1 Apr 2013
- Interview
Restoring U.S. Competitiveness: Professor Michael Porter in an interview with Charlie Rose
"There is an historic opportunity right now for business and government to work together [to restore U.S. competitiveness]." Professor Porter discusses the eight federal policy priorities that business leaders and policymakers, liberals and conservatives agree will... View Details
- Article
Tax Policy and the Efficiency of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
By: Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James R. Hines Jr.
Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among "tax expenditures" and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End
By: L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely and M. Bazerman
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of the document, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their... View Details
Keywords: Nudge; Morality; Honesty; Self-report; Policy-making; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Reports; Policy
- March 2012
- Article
Macroeconomic Policy and U.S. Competitiveness
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Matthew Weinzierl
The United States is on a glide path to fiscal disaster, with experts projecting that the federal government will take in far less money than it spends-indefinitely. Our current fiscal policy is eroding competitiveness in several ways, and business conditions in the... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
Reviving Entrepreneurship
By: Josh Lerner and William Sahlman
New enterprises don't exist in a vacuum: They rise or fall depending on myriad contextual factors, all of them interrelated, and all of them affected by government policy. U.S. lawmakers must carefully consider the effects of interventions in at least 12 areas, ranging... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details
- 2012
- Article
The Excess Burden of Government Indecision
By: Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Luis M. Viceira
Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it... View Details
- October 2011
- Article
The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes
This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Tax Policy and the Efficiency of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad
By: Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley and James R. Hines Jr.
Deferral of U.S. taxes on foreign source income is commonly characterized as a subsidy to foreign investment, as reflected in its inclusion among "tax expenditures" and occasional calls for its repeal. This paper analyzes the extent to which tax deferral and other... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised April 2012)
- Case
Angels in British Columbia
By: Josh Lerner, Thomas Hellmann and Ilkin Ilyaszade
The case study provides an overview of the angel investment practices and describes government policies towards angel and venture capital investing in British Columbia, Canada. It focuses in particular on the Equity Capital Program (BCECP henceforth), which provides... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Institutional Tax Clienteles and Payout Policy
By: Mihir Desai and Li Jin
This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relation between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional... View Details
- Article
Do Strong Fences Make Strong Neighbors?
By: Mihir Desai and Dhammika Dharmapala
Many features of U.S. tax policy towards multinational firms-including the governing principle of capital export neutrality, the byzantine system of expense allocation, and anti-inversion legislation-reflect the intuition that building "strong fences" around the United... View Details
- April 2010 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
California's Budget Crises, Tax Reform, and Domestic and International Tax Competition
By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Jacob Kuipers
How do (and how should) governments design fiscal policies to compete in a globalized economy while meeting internal policy priorities including redistribution? In 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger repeatedly declared fiscal emergencies as California's state budget... View Details