Matt Weinzierl is Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program at Harvard Business School, where he is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, in particular taxation, with an emphasis on better understanding the philosophical principles underlying policy choices. Recently, he has launched a set of research projects focused on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications, viewable at www.economicsofspace.com. He has served on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Tax Expenditure Commission, the board of the National Tax Association, and on the editorial boards of Social Choice and Welfare and National Tax Journal. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2008, Professor Weinzierl served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.
Professor Weinzierl has written on a range of topics in optimal taxation and optimal economic policy more generally. His work in Positive Optimal Tax Theory has focused on identifying and formalizing the goals for tax policy that hold sway among the public, political and economic leaders, and leading tax thinkers, and then characterizing the implications of using those objectives in the analysis of optimal taxation. In other work, he has explored the potential value of age-dependent taxation, the dynamic feedback effects of tax changes, the use of fiscal policy to counteract recessions, the proper price-indexing of Social Security, and the impact of differences in beliefs and tastes across individuals on optimal tax design. His research has been published in Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Journals: Economic Policy, Journal of Monetary Economics, Economic Journal, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, National Tax Journal, and Journal of Economic Perspectives, and has been discussed in the Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He also participated in the 2008 Review of Economic Studies tour.
Professor Weinzierl currently serves as Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program. He previously served as Program Chair of the MBA Required Curriculum (RC), the first year curriculum of the HBS MBA. Prior to those position, he was the coursehead for Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE), an RC course, and as Chair of MBA Community Standards and the Conduct Review Board at HBS. He has created and currently teaches two courses in the Elective Curriculum: The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME) and Space, Public and Commercial Economics (SPACE). For the former, he has written case studies on public education, national health insurance, welfare reform, immigration, and a variety of topics in taxation. For the latter, he has written case studies of Astroscale, Blue Origin, Made In Space, NASA, Planetary Resources, Space Angels, SpaceX, Spire, the U.S. Space Force, and other institutions.