Out with the old, in with the new

My Tax I students from last semester will probably be glad to hear that I have submitted my grades. I am even gladder to reflect on the closely associated fact that I have finished grading their exams.

Grading exams is by far the worst part of a law prof's work - nothing else is even close. The tedium of reading 80-plus answers to the same question, one after the other, and having to keep one's critical faculties engaged enough to scribble down a reasonably fair number at the end, verges on indescribable.

This week, my classes for the spring semester begin. I'm co-teaching Tax Deals with Mihir Desai, and the Tax Policy Colloquium with Alan Auerbach. The former should be a really interesting experience, involving the Scholes-Wolfson framework and lots of actual deals brought in by leading NYC tax practitioners, although it's all coming together a bit at the last minute. The latter I am very hopeful will be good as always (from my biased perspective at least), and our paper schedule for it is as follows:

1. January 15 – Daniel Shaviro, NYU Law School. “The Long-Term Fiscal Gap: Is the Main Problem Generational Inequity?”
2. January 22 – Alan Auerbach, Berkeley Economics Department and NYU Law School. “Understanding U.S. Corporate Tax Losses.”
3. January 29 – Edward Kleinbard, Joint Committee on Taxation. “A Reconsideration of Tax Expenditure Analysis.”
4. February 5 – Amy Finkelstein, MIT Economics Department, “EZ-Tax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates.”
5. February 12 – Dorothy Brown, Emory Law School, “Shades of the American Dream.”
6. February 19 – Yoram Margalioth, Tel Aviv University Law School and NYU Law School, “Taking a Closer Look at Capital Export Neutrality.”
7. February 26 – Leslie McCall, Northwestern University Sociology Department, “American Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality.”
8. March 5 – Michael Doran, University of Virginia Law School, “Managers, Shareholders, and the Double Corporate Tax.”
9. March 12 – David Duff, University of Toronto Law School, “Tax Fairness and the Tax Mix.”
10. March 26 – Emmanuel Saez, Berkeley Economics Department. “Details Matter: The Impact of Presentation and Information on the Take-Up of Financial Incentives for Retirement Saving.”
11. April 2 – Lily Batchelder, NYU Law School.
12. April 9 – Mihir Desai, Harvard Business School and NYU Law School.
13. April 16 – Mitchell Kane, NYU Law School.
14. April 23 – Thomas Brennan, Northwestern Law School, “Certainty and Uncertainty in the Taxation of Risky Returns.”

All colloquium sessions will meet from 4-6 pm on Thursdays in Furman Hall 120 at NYU Law School. People outside NYU are welcome, although to get past the security guards they should let me know in advance by e-mail. Interested individuals can also contact me to get on our e-mail distribution list for weekly papers.