Rice U. economics expert to testify before Congress July 28

MEDIA ADVISORY

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Rice U. economics expert to testify before Congress July 28

HOUSTON – (July 24, 2015) – John Diamond, an economics and tax expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, will testify before the U.S. Joint Economic Committee on the impact of dynamic scoring at 2 p.m. EDT July 28 in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C.

Diamond will provide an oral statement and take questions from the committee for its hearing on “Dynamic Scoring: How Will It Affect Fiscal Policymaking?” Dynamic scoring predicts the impact of fiscal policy changes by forecasting how economic agents will react to incentives created by policy.

Who: John Diamond, the Edward A. and Hermena Hancock Kelly Fellow in Public Finance at Rice’s Baker Institute and adjunct professor of economics at Rice.

What: Hearing: “Dynamic Scoring: How Will It Affect Fiscal Policymaking?”

When: 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 28.

Where: Hart Senate Office Building, Room 216, Washington, D.C.

Also testifying before the committee will be Phil Gramm, former chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and senior adviser at U.S. Policy Metrics; Kevin Hassett, director of Economic Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute; and John Buckley, former chief of staff to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., chairs the joint committee, whose ranking member is Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.

Diamond will be available after the hearing for one-on-one media interviews.

Diamond is also CEO of Tax Policy Advisers LLC. His research interests include federal tax and expenditure policy, state and local public finance, and the construction and simulation of computable general equilibrium models. His current research focuses on the economic effects of corporate tax reform, the economic and distributional effects of fundamental tax reform, individual portfolio allocation in the 2000s and various other tax policy issues.

He is co-editor of “Pathways to Fiscal Reform in the United States”(The MIT Press, 2015) and “Fundamental Tax Reform: Issues, Choices and Implications” (The MIT Press, 2008). Diamond is the forum editor for the National Tax Journal and has served on the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, United States Congress (2000-2004). He has also served as a consultant on the efficacy of structural adjustment programs to the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Rice University in 2000.

For more information or to schedule an interview with Diamond, contact David Ruth, director of national of national and broadcast media at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

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