If there's one thing I really want to accomplish over the rest of the summer - other than taking advantage of the NYC farmers markets' fresh fruit bonanza while it lasts - it's to make serious progress on my international tax book, which has taken very definite form inside my head but needs to be extracted and actualized.
But first I had to get straight the reading list and plan of action for the seminar on corporate and international tax policy that I am teaching this fall (starting a week before Labor Day). It's all very well to assign the students reading from this handy item, but I realized that wouldn't do the job all by itself. Luckily, my syllabus is now set, leaving me much more enthusiastic about the seminar than I was a mere 24 hours ago, when I still had various unsolved obstacles. Now the main concern I have left is whether I will draw genuinely interested students, rather than people who simply seek to fulfill a course requirement or keep their classes early in the week. (My holy grail is a filter to select positively for students who are genuinely interested, although admittedly, from the standpoint of the overall NYU faculty, this amounts to attempted cream-skimming.)
Now with that done, I've reluctantly persuaded myself that it makes a great deal of sense to write a short piece on taxes and the financial crisis, for a forthcoming volume associated with the conference, at Bocconi University in Milan, that I attended at the end of April (if only virtually, by skype, due to back spasms), and reported on here. The slides on which I will base the paper are still available here.
In other news, I should soon have 3 fresh publications out there on the at least virtual street. One is my paper for the George Washington Law Review on the long-term U.S. fiscal gap, a second is a piece for the British Tax Review on the Obama Administration's international tax reform proposals, and the third is a very short one for Tax Notes that's part of a series they should be publishing shortly on where the Volcker tax reform panel that ostensibly is hard at work should look for ideas. More on these when they come out.
And while I'm at it, I don't believe I've ever posted a link for my recently published article, Internationalization of Income Measures and the U.S. Book-Tax Relationship, which appears to be available here.
Well this is ahead of me--I'm vacationing in upstate New York and I've been working on the same book for ten years. But the rhythm of the academic summer, in which the irresistible force of fresh ideas meets the immovable object of the vacation impulse, sounds familiar. Here's to all the projects that will be finished by Labor Day--and all that, inevitably, won't be.
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