Current projects list

For some reason, the embarrassing weakness of the badly over-written yet under-baked The Godfather, Part III, (despite a great plot idea: ruthless American gangster finds that he's out of his league dealing with sharpies from the Vatican) has not prevented its most famous quote from being widely remembered: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

My version of this quote would be: "Just when I think I'm starting to run out of ideas to write about, they give me new ones."  For me, of course, it's good rather than bad, and "they" refers to people who are holding conferences, compiling edited volumes, etc.

My main project these days is writing a book on the super-rich in selected works of literature (great and otherwise) from the last two centuries.  Tentative title: "Visions and the Versions of the Point-One Percent."  However, I don't think this title quite captures what the project is actually about, so I am probably going to feel compelled to change it.

This book, which I am quite enthusiastic about and finding fun to write when I can find the time, is a byproduct of the Piketty conference that we held at NYU last October, and of the paper for that conference that I co-authored with Joe Bankman.

Due to further conference and book invites, I'm probably also going to write short papers on:

(1) How the framework that I develop in my book on international tax policy suggests thinking about recent developments in the international tax field (e.g., OECD BEPS, the UK Google tax, and recent US international tax reform proposals).  Tentative title: "Getting a 'Fix' on Recent Developments in International Tax Policy."  Play on words here, since "Fixing" is the first word of my book title.

(2) The current US practice, which no other country follows, of imposing at least some degree of worldwide income taxation on nonresident citizens.

(3) For a book (without conference) that will consist of invited articles discussing timing and legislation from various perspectives, I have a piece in mind that's tentatively called "On Beyond Indexing."

(4) I may also take a chapter from my book-in-progress on the super-rich in literature, and use it aas a standalone piece (for a conference on tax & philosophy), entitled something like "The Social Sciences and Beyond in Evaluating High-End Wealth Inequality."  Inside the book, this chapter serves to explain the possible relevance of reading literature to how one might think about the issues raised by high-end wealth inequality.  But this makes it potentially suitable for separate use as a standalone piece on how to frame the relevant normative issues. E,g., what do conventional economic approaches leave out.

I suppose all this should keep me off the streets (and often on the road), for the rest of 2015 and probably well into 2016.