Rosanne Altshuler

Richard Musgrave Visiting Professorship 2023

Professor Rosanne Altshuler is the CESifo and IIPF Richard Musgrave Guest Professor 2023. She is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Rutgers University and former Chair of the Economics Department and Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers. Her research focuses on federal tax policy and has been published in numerous journals and books.

Professor Altshuler is the recipient of the National Tax Association’s most prestigious award, the Daniel M. Holland Medal for lifetime achievement in the study of the theory and practice of public finance. She is a former Editor of the National Tax Journal and former Editor of the Policy Watch section of International Tax and Public Finance. She has served as President of the National Tax Association and been a member of the Board of Directors of the National Tax Association, the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office, and the Board of Trustees of the American Tax Policy Institute. She has been granted distinguished honorary member status of the National Tax Association. She is the recipient of two university-wide excellence in teaching awards from Rutgers University.

Rosanne Altshuler’s research concentrates on the effects of taxation on corporate behavior with a focus on multinational corporations. She has been a pioneer in using administrative tax return data to study the behavioral effects of taxation on corporations. Her work has examined the effect of taxes on the investment and financial decisions of MNCs, tax competition between governments, the significance of tax havens to tax policy, and the reform of the taxation of cross-border income.

She has been active in the policy world as Director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Senior Economist to the 2005 President’s Advisory Panel of Federal Tax Reform, and Special Advisor to the Joint Committee on Taxation. She has testified before the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committee.

Professor Altshuler received her B.A. from Tufts University and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was the winner of the National Tax Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1988. From 1987 to 1992 she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Columbia University. She moved to Rutgers University in 1992.

She is currently studying how changes in the cost of investing abroad influence the domestic economic activity of MNCs. This project is part of the Joint Statistical Research Program of the United States Internal Revenue Service. Working with co-authors Lysle Boller and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, she is using new information from corporate tax forms to study tax planning by MNCs and how it impacts foreign effective tax rates as well as foreign and domestic economic decisions. During her stay at CESifo, she will explore how MNC tax planning structures have evolved with changes in the tax landscape designed to limit tax avoidance.