Monday, October 25, 2010

Talk today at St. John's University Law School

I'm heading to Queens, NYC shortly to give a lunch talk at St. John's University Law School, based on my just-published paper (with Doug Shackelford and Joel Slemrod) Taxation and the Financial Sector.

I've given talks on this paper and posted the slides before. But, as I've shortened and clarified them for today, in good part by downplaying issues (such as retributively motivated bonus taxes) that are much less of-the-moment now than when we were writing the paper, I'll post a pdf of the revised slides here.

UPDATE: The session went well. Much of the discussion focused on financial transactions tax (a.k.a. turnover tax or Tobin tax) versus financial activities tax (falling on extra-normal financial institutions profits, on the view that they're either rents or else correlated with tail risk that creates negative externalities). I'm more sympathetic to the latter and think it worth exploring further, though this appears these days to be politically unlikely.

But the high point personally for me came shortly before the talk, when one of the faculty members in attendance (whom I hadn't met before) handed me a copy of Getting It to sign, and told me (as have several other readers) that it had given him a delightful day over the summer and made him laugh out loud at numerous points.

No comments: