Keynote Speakers

JAMES POTERBA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Population Aging and the Evolving Role of the State

 

James Poterba is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT and the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has served as the President of the National Tax Association, Vice President of the American Economic Association, and as a Director of the American Finance Association. Dr. Poterba's research focuses on how taxation affects the economic decisions of households and firms. His recent work has emphasized the effect of taxation on the financial behavior of households, particularly their saving and portfolio decisions in personal retirement accounts. Dr. Poterba served as a member of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform in 2005. He was an editor of the Journal of Public Economics between 1997 and 2006.

 

 

EMMANUEL SAEZ, University of California, Berkeley

Efficient Policies for Redistribution

 

Emmanuel Saez is the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1999. He was Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University from 1999 to 2002, before joining the faculty at Berkeley in 2002. He has been editor of the Journal of Public Economics and co-director of the Public Policy Program at Center for Economic and Policy Research. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 2009, and in 2010 received a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His main areas of research are centered around taxation, redistribution, and inequality, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective.

 

 

 

HANS-WERNER SINN, CESifo Group

Praying for the European Monetary Union:
Flaws, Risks, and Policy Options

 

Hans-Werner Sinn is Professor of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich (LMU), President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Director of the University of Munich’s Center for Economic Studies, and Director of CESifo. He is a member of the Council of Economic Advisors to the German Ministry of Economics as well as former president of the International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF). Sinn holds honorary doctorate degrees of the universities of Magdeburg and Helsinki, and he has been honoured with the Maximilians Order. He is the author of more than 20 monographs and 135 scientific articles.

 

 

RICK VAN DER PLOEG, Oxford University

A Macro Perspective on Public Finance: 
Natural Resources and the Environment

 

Rick van der Ploeg is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and is Co-Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies.  Formerly, he was Professor of Economics at the European University Institute, Florence and is Adjunct Professor at the VU University of Amsterdam and a research fellow of the Tinbergen Institute. He is a research fellow in international macroeconomics at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and directs the public sector economics programme at CESifo. He has published extensively on macroeconomics, public finance, political economy and resource economics, and also has an interest in the economics of culture. Publications include Foundations of Modern Macroeconomics with B.J. Heijdra (Oxford University Press, 2002), the edited Handbook of International Macroeconomics, and several other books.

DAVID WILDASIN, University of Kentucky

Economic Integration and Fiscal Policy in a Dynamic Context:
Competition and Factor Mobility

David Wildasin is Endowed Professor of Public Finance at the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, and Professor of Economics, at the University of Kentucky, where  he has directed the Institute for Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations.  He has previously held permanent academic positions at the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and Vanderbilt University, and has held visiting and consulting positions at Queen's University, the Catholic University of Louvain, the World Bank, and many other academic institutions and research institutes. He is a research fellow of CESifo (Munich), IZA (Bonn), and the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation. His research interests include fiscal federalism and the implications of labor and capital market integration for fiscal policy analysis, both in subnational and international contexts.  Recent studies have focused on such topics as municipal investment spending, state corporation income taxation, fiscal competition with dynamic factor mobility, Federal support for state welfare and Medicaid programs, and intergovernmental policies for disaster avoidance and relief.