Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Preview of Literature and Inequality

Most of the book's first 49 pages can be viewed for free here.

The Amazon Kindle version and preview aren't up yet, but I hope soon. The B&N Nook version appears to be live.

Monday, March 23, 2020

Fall 2020 NYU Tax Policy Colloquium

At this point, we obviously do not know what the fall 2020 semester will look like, be it at NYU Law School or anywhere else. But the possibilities surely include its taking place more or less as normal, or else perhaps via Zoom.

In any event, the schedule was 99% set when the coronavirus stoppage got rolling, so I figured, why not take the last couple of steps to complete it.

I should note that I don't yet know for sure who will be my co-convenor. That, actually, was up in the air even before the transformation.

Anyway, with full hopes (whether or not confidence) that this will actually happen, here is what we hope to have on tap:

SCHEDULE FOR FALL 2020 NYU TAX POLICY COLLOQUIUM

(All sessions meet from 4:00-5:50 pm in Vanderbilt 208, NYU Law School)

1.     Tuesday, August 25 – Steven Dean, NYU Law School
2.     Tuesday, September 1 – Daniel Shaviro, NYU Law School
3.     Tuesday, September 8  – Natasha Sarin, University of Pennsylvania Law School
4.     Tuesday, September 15 – Adam Kern, Princeton Politics Department and NYU Law School

5.     Tuesday, September 22 – Henrik Kleven, Princeton Economics Department
6.     Tuesday, September 29 – Leandra Lederman, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
7.     Tuesday, October 6 – Michelle Hanlon, MIT Sloan School of Management
8.     Tuesday, October 13 – Steve Rosenthal, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
9.     Tuesday, October 20 –Michelle Layser, University of Illinois College of Law

10.  Tuesday, October 27 – Clinton Wallace, University of South Carolina School of Law
11.  Tuesday, November 10 – Owen Zidar, Princeton Economics Department
12.  Tuesday, November 17Abdoulaye Ndiaye, NYU Stern Business School
13.  Tuesday, November 24 – Lilian Faulhaber, Georgetown Law School
14.  Tuesday, December 1 – Erin Scharff, Arizona State Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law

My book Literature and Inequality is now live

I realize that such things seem trivial right now, but my new book Literature and Inequality has now gone live, as per the Anthem Press link here and the Amazon link here.

UPDATE: Barnes and Noble has a better price for Literature and Inequality.

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Remarks from 2019 Fordham international tax conference

Sometime back in October 2019, Fordham Law School hosted a symposium entitled "The Future of the New International Tax Regime." Remarks (including mine) from the session, which featured a number of well-known international tax scholars, have now been printed in physical form by the Fordham Journal of Corporate and Financial Law, and are also available online.

You can find the full proceedings here. My remarks are at pages 250-258 if you go by the numbered physical pages, aka pages 33-41 within the posted file.

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Literature and Inequality book launch, cover art

With events being canceled all over the place, I realized that it was time to make things official, and scrap the once-firm plans for the following book event:

New York University School of Law
invites you to a discussion of
Literature and Inequality: Nine Perspectives from the Napoleonic Era Through the First Gilded Age (Anthem Press)
with author
Daniel N. Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation
Branko Milanovic, Stone Center Senior Scholar, Visiting Presidential Professor
The Graduate Center, CUNY
And
Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law
Monday, April 13, 4:30 p.m.

All things permitting, including in particular the state of life here more generally, I anticipate this event's being rescheduled for the fall.

Meanwhile, here is an advance look at the book's cover art:


Wednesday, March 04, 2020

New article (coming soon) on minimum taxes

I've just completed a new article draft, entitled "What Are Minimum Taxes, and Why Might One Favor or Disfavor Them?" It addresses, among other topics:

(1) the purposive, technical, and semantic contours of what the term "minimum tax" is generally used to mean, along with the reasons why these matter - relating, for example, to the creation of clientele effects and discontinuous marginal incentives,

(2 the lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of the alternative minimum tax (AMT),

(3) the Biden versus Warren design question of whether, if one gave tax consequences to highly profitable companies' financial statement accounting income, this should involve the use of a minimum tax structure or a standalone structure,

(4) the relationship between avowed minimum taxes and provisions, such as loss nonrefundability and applying foreign tax credit limitations, that set a zero percent floor on a particular tax rate,

(5) the issues posed by global minimum taxes, including GILTI in U.S. law and the OECD's recent GloBE minimum tax proposal.

In general I am quite skeptical about minimum taxes, although there may at times be optical or political economy reasons for preferring them to a given, limited set of realistically available alternatives.

I'll post it on SSRN soon, but probably not until I get some feedback from presenting it. The problem with posting too soon is that some of one's readership looks at it too early, before it's been improved. Barring travel restrictions from the coronavirus, I'll be presenting it at the Critical Tax Conference in Gainesville, FL, on April 3 or 4, and then at the Maurer Law School's 2020 Tax Policy Colloquium (in Bloomington, IN) on April 9. Also possibly in Oxford this summer, if international travel is feasible.