December 17, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Eric M. Engen is a resident scholar at AEI, where his research focuses on tax and budget policy, Social Security, household saving behavior, financial markets, and the macro economy. Mr. Engen is currently working on a book titled Social Security Reform: Sorting out the Sense from the Nonsense. He is the author or coauthor of many academic articles published in the American Economic Review, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Federal Reserve Bulletin, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Monetary Economics, National Tax Journal, and Tax Notes. Before joining AEI, Mr. Engen was a section chief and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board. He also was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California–Los Angeles and a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Engen received the National Tax Association's Doctoral Dissertation Award in Government Finance and Taxation in 1992.

Jagadeesh Gokhale is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Mr. Gokhale, a former senior economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, served in 2002 as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Treasury and in 2003 as a visiting scholar with AEI. He is associated with Cato's Project on Social Security Choice and examines the problems of entitlement programs—Social Security and Medicare—and evaluates and helps design market-based reforms to Social Security. He is widely recognized as one of the nation's leading experts on U.S. fiscal policy and its impact on current and future generations. His latest book, Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: New Budget Measures for New Budget Priorities, coauthored with Kent Smetters, drew widespread attention when it was published by AEI after the Bush administration declined to include it in the federal budget document for which it had been commissioned. Earlier, his work on the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy and its effect on intergenerational transfers appeared in the Budget of the United States (fiscal years 1993, 1994, and 1995). Mr. Gokhale has published papers in the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and in several publications of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He is also the author of The Impact of Social Security Reform on Low-Income Workers and coauthor of Social Security Privatization: One Proposal (with David Altig), both Cato Institute Social Security Choice Papers.

Jane G. Gravelle is currently a senior specialist in economic policy in the Government and Finance Division of Congressional Research Service (CRS). She specializes in the economics of taxation, particularly the effects of tax policies on economic growth and resource allocation. Her recent papers have addressed consumption taxes, dynamic revenue estimating, investment subsidies, capital gains taxes, individual retirement accounts, estate and gift taxes, family tax issues, charitable contributions, and corporate taxation. In addition to her work at CRS, she is the author of numerous articles in books and professional journals, including recent papers on the behavioral responses to consumption taxes and tax depreciation, and she is the author of the Economic Effects of Taxing Capital Income; coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy; and editor of the Tax Expenditure Compendium published every two years by the Senate Budget Committee. Ms. Gravelle is president of the National Tax Association.

John Karl Scholz is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 1997 to1998, he was the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, and from 1990 to 1991, he was a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. He directed the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2000 to 2004. He has written extensively on the earned income tax credit and low-wage labor markets and on public policy and household saving, charitable contributions, and bankruptcy laws. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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