M-RCBG Senior Fellow-Led Study Group: Ioana Petrescu


The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: What Do We Know So Far? with guest speaker Aparna Mathur
January 30, 4:00-5:30  M-RCBG Conference Room, B-503

The United States passed historic tax reform in December 2017 titled the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This tax reform brought about the largest change in corporate taxes since President Reagan’s 1986 tax reform. The premise of the TCJA is that reductions in the corporate tax rate will have long run positive impacts on the economy. Is this happening? What do we know from the data so far? To discuss this, we will host Aparna Mathur, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, who works on tax policy. She recently hosted a tax blog series at AEI titled “Trump’s tax reform happened: Now What?”. Here is the link to the series:  https://www.aei.org/trumps-tax-reform-happened-now-what/

Aparna Mathur dark blazer with mocha colored riffled shirt, smilingAparna Mathur is a resident scholar in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she researches income inequality and mobility, tax policy, labor markets, and small businesses. She also directs the AEI-Brookings Project on Paid Family and Medical Leave, for which she was recognized in the 2017 Politico 50 list. She currently serves on the University of Maryland Leadership Council and on the board of the National Economists Club.
Before joining AEI, Dr. Mathur was an instructor in economics at the University of Maryland. She has been also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy (now the McCourt School of Public Policy).
Dr. Mathur has been published in several top scholarly journals and in the popular press on issues of policy relevance. Her work has been cited in academic journals and leading news outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal. She has also testified several times before Congress, and government organizations such as the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office have cited her work in their own reports to Congress.
The holder of a PhD and an MA in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Mathur also has an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics and a BA from Hindu College at Delhi University in India.


Photo of Ioana Petrescu at her deskIoana Petrescu is a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Petrescu is a former Romanian Finance Minister. While minister, she pursued policies to cut tax evasion and tax avoidance, promote financial transparency, improve tax compliance, lower the tax burden for businesses and keep fiscal discipline. She also served in the government as an economic adviser to the prime minister and head of his delivery unit, where she monitored the implementation of the prime minister’s priorities in procurement, employment, energy and tax compliance. She is an international consultant on issues such as tax reform, central government delivery and local public services and runs the Center for Leadership and Innovation at the National School of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest. In the past, she also served as an expert for the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels. She was an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland and she holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. She published in various academic journals and newspapers. Her 2017 book, Essays in Taxation and International Relations, analyzes issues such as flat taxation and government revenues. Ioana’s research project, Democracy and Delivery: The Devil is in the Details, explores good practices in the delivery of public goods and services in new democracies characterized by corruption and clientelism, low paid bureaucrats, poor institutions, frequent political turnover, unclear legislation, and little transparency. Her faculty sponsor is Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School. Email: ioanapetrescu@hks.harvard.edu