Publications

January 2010 (Revised March 2011)
Case

Ben Bernanke: Person of the Year?

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Matthew C. Weinzierl

In response to the economic and financial crisis of 2008–2009, the Federal Reserve greatly expanded the scale and scope of its activities. Though lauded by many experts for its actions, the Fed and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, faced harsh criticism from some public... View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Central Banking; Governance Controls; Policy; Crisis Management; Power and Influence; Public Administration Industry; United States

Article

Space, the Final Economic Frontier

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

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

Keywords: Emerging Markets; Economics; Private Sector; Aerospace Industry

December 2013 (Revised December 2014)
Case

Reform in the Chicago Public Schools

By: Matthew Weinzierl and Katrina Flanagan

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers' Union went on strike over proposed reforms by the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel. At the heart of the reforms, and the strike, was frustration over many decades of underperformance in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and a surge of... View Details

Keywords: Public Education; Public Goods; Samuelson Rule; Externalities And Pigouvian Corrections; Tiebout Sorting And Efficiency; Education; Labor Unions; Public Administration Industry; Education Industry; Chicago

June 2021 (Revised December 2021)
Case

The Lunar Gateway, Moon vs. Mars, and the Political Governance of Space Activities

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang

In 2017, the Trump Administration made a bold claim—that they would return the next man and the first woman to the lunar surface by 2024, this time to establish a sustainable presence to enable further exploration in the solar system. With the Artemis Program, NASA has... View Details

Keywords: Space; Space Economy; Aerospace; Nasa; Governance; Policy; International Relations; Infrastructure

19 May 2015
First Look

First Look: May 19

the conventional financial system and the real economy. Publisher's link: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.2.213 May 2015 Journal of Public Economics De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution By: Lockwood,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Article

Optimal Taxation in Theory and Practice

By: N. Gregory Mankiw, Matthew C. Weinzierl and Danny Yagan

We highlight and explain eight lessons from optimal tax theory and compare them to the last few decades of OECD tax policy. As recommended by theory, top marginal income tax rates have declined, marginal income tax schedules have flattened, redistribution has risen... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Theory; Practice; Policy

February 2015 (Revised August 2019)
Case

Equality of Opportunity and Outcome in the U.S.

By: Matthew Weinzierl and Alastair Su

Equality of opportunity is endorsed universally even though, or more likely because, it can mean such different things to different people. What definition of equality of opportunity ought to figure into policy decisions? How close, or far, is the United States from... View Details

Keywords: Equality Of Opportunity; Justice; Opportunities; Equality and Inequality; Policy; United States

Research Summary

Overview

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

My academic research centers on uncovering and closing gaps between the theory and reality of tax policy. My main contribution has been to identify and address a mismatch between the goals for taxation typically assumed in theory and the goals the public and... View Details

October 2011
Article

The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

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

Keywords: Taxation; Policy; Age; Income; Mathematical Methods; Welfare; United States

October 2014
Article

The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice

By: Matthew Weinzierl

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

Keywords: Taxation; Theory

11 Apr 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research, April 11

Advances in Strategic Management Innovation Policies By: Nanda, Ramana, and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf Abstract—Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation... View Details

2017
Working Paper

A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy

By: Matthew Weinzierl

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

Keywords: Ethics; Policy; Economics

SSRN

2020
Working Paper

Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation

By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl

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 policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details

Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Robust Optimization; Taxation; Income; Policy; Design

2020
Working Paper

Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation

By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew C. Weinzierl

Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and... View Details

Keywords: Prioritarianism; Optimal Taxation; Utilitarianism; Redistribution; Inverse-optimum; Taxation; Theory

January 2009 (Revised October 2011)
Case

Barack Obama and the Bush Tax Cuts (A)

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Eric D. Werker

As his inauguration approached, President-elect Obama faced a financial sector meltdown, a costly bailout, and massive government deficits. With the economy in recession, interest rates near zero, and joblessness on the rise, Obama needed to decide whether, and how... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Financial Crisis; Borrowing and Debt; Financial Management; Policy; Government Administration; Taxation; United States

Fall 2014
Article

Seesaws and Social Security Benefits Indexing

By: Matthew Weinzierl

The price indexation of Social Security benefit payments has emerged in recent years as a flashpoint of debate in the United States. I characterize the direct effects that changes in that price index would have on retirees who differ in their initial wealth at... View Details

Keywords: Retirement; Compensation and Benefits; United States

March 2022 (Revised March 2023)
Case

Commercial Space Stations, Chickens and Eggs, and Demand for Activity in Low-Earth Orbit

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Brendan L. Rosseau

With the International Space Station set to retire in January 2031, NASA has made clear its desire to transition to commercially-led space stations in low-earth orbit (LEO). But the history of commercial station attempts has been fraught, characterized by a lack of... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Opportunities; Business Model; Travel Industry; Transportation Industry; Aerospace Industry