Carnegie Mellon Heinz College

Biography

Prior to coming to Carnegie-Mellon in 1979, I was a member of the economics department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for ten years, and in 1992-4, Visiting Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Rochester.

My academic career has involved several periods of federal service which resulted in the receipt of presidential pens in recognition of my contributions to legislation signed by President Nixon in 1972, and President Ford in 1976.

During 1970-1, I was a Brookings Economic Policy Fellow at the U.S. Treasury Department, and served as assistant to Murray L. Weidenbaum, Assistant Secretary for Economic Poliy, and then as assistant to Treasury Deputy Secretary Charls S. Walker. In 1972, I received the U.S. Treasury Department's Exceptional Service Award from Treasury Secretary John Connally for the design of the General Revenue Sharing legislation.

Upon invitation of Laurence N. Woodworth in 1975, I joined the Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, U.S. Congress, and served as a staff economist for three years. The Joint Committe was established in 1913 to assist the tax-writing committees of the Congress on all matters relating to the Internal Revenue Code. While at the Joint Committee, I had primary responsibility for: the 1976 renewal of the General Revenue Sharing legislation, the 1975 and 1978 Federal tax legislation enabling New York City's municipal pension funds to purchase City and State securities during the City's fiscal crisis, that portion of the 1976 Tax Reform Act broadening state access to optional Federal collection of state income taxes, all energy savings estimates for the House and Senate and the 1978 residential and industrial energy tax credits in conjunction with President Carter's energy initiatives, and, with Wendell Primus and Randy Weiss, Chairman Ullman's 1978 welfare reform proposal which responded to President Carter's welfare reform proposal.

Since joining the faculty of the Heinz School in 1979, I have been involved in a number of significant state level tax policy projects. During 1979-81, I was Director of Research of the Pennsylvania Tax Commission. From 1983-5, I worked for the West Virginia Tax Study Commission, the Joint Finance Committee of the Legislature and the West Virginia Tax Department, on ways to restructure West Virginia's tax system. That effort culminated in drafting H.B. 1693 which completely restructured West Virginia's business taxes effective 1987. In June, 1987, I received the Distinguished Service Award from the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Tax Executives Institute.

In July, 1987, I completed an 18 month study for the State of Washington Department of Revenue as National Can was being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, and devised a system of personal and business income taxes to replace Washington's structure of sales, excise, and gross receipts taxes.

In August, 1987, I was appointed to the Pennsylvania Local Tax Reform Commission to advise Governor Robert Casey on local tax reform prior to the Special Session of the General Assembly which began November 9, 1987, and which resulted in authorizing legislation in 1988 to reform Pennsylvania's system of local taxation.

My research includes better than 90 scholarly papers, and service on the advisory boards of several Federal statistical agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income Division and the Governments Division of the Census Bureau. At CMU, I served as Secretary of the CMU Faculty, Chair of the CMU Faculty Senate Computer Advisory Committee, and Vice-Chair of the CMU Faculty Senate Committee on the University Budget during 1991-2. From 1989-95, I was a member of the Revenue Estimating Advisory Committee of the Joint Committee on Taxation, U.S. Congress, and was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Tax Association in October, 1995.

Current research projects include: the analysis of teen attitudes towards future education, their peers, and their studies in an urban school district; the relationship between teacher quality and student performance in Pennsylvania; the study of central-city migration patterns in Pennsylvania with tax return information for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; and the design of a simplified sales and use tax regime in conjunction with the National Tax Association Project on the Taxation of Electronic Commerce.

Education

B.A., Economics, University of Michigan, LS&A Honors College
Ph.D., Economics, University of Wisconsin

Representative Publications

Working Papers

• Distributional Analysis of Prospective 2009 US Individual Income Taxes: Current Law and the Candidates’ Tax Plans

• Improving Public Education through Strengthened Local Control

• Bellcurves and Babies: The Interaction between Ability, Welfare, and Non-marital Childbearing Submit Entry
   

• Distributional and Economic Effects of Pennsylvania's Local Property Taxes
   

• A Reverse Engineering Approach to Improving Teacher Quality: The Hiring Decision and State Laws Governing School Board Conduct and Ethics
   

• A Survey of State Laws Governing School Board Ethics
   

• Did Welfare Cause the Increase in Non-marital Childbearing in the United States?
   

• Effective Tax Functions for the US Individual Income Tax: 1966-89
   

H. John Heinz III College
Carnegie Mellon University

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Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890

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