Professor, Harvard Business School
Matt Weinzierl is a Professor in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to his doctoral studies at Harvard, Professor Weinzierl worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in financial services. From 2003 to 2004, he served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Professor Weinzierl has written on a range of topics in optimal taxation and optimal economic policy more generally. His most recent projects, associated with the idea of Positive Optimal Tax Theory, focus 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. Professor Weinzierl is also the creator of an elective course at HBS entitled “The Role of Government in Market Economies.” For that course, he has written case studies on public education, national health insurance, welfare reform, immigration, and a variety of topics in taxation.
Recently, Professor Weinzierl launched a set of research projects focused on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications. He has authored case studies for the classroom on Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, Astroscale, and other companies and topics within the commercial space sector, and he is in the process of preparing a research article introducing academic economists to key economic aspects of the commercialization of human activities in space.
