Experts

Mark Mazur left the Urban Institute in January 2021.

Mark J. Mazur is the Robert C. Pozen director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a vice president at the Urban Institute. His research interests cover all aspects of tax policy. From 2012 until early 2017, he was the assistant secretary for tax policy at the US Department of the Treasury. Mazur served in the federal government for 27 years in various positions, including policy economist at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; senior director at the National Economic Council; chief economist and senior policy adviser and director of policy at the US Department of Energy; acting administrator of the Energy Information Administration; director of research, analysis, and statistics at the Internal Revenue Service; and deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis in the Office of Tax Policy. Before entering public service, Mazur was an assistant professor in Heinz College at Carnegie-Mellon University. He has a bachelor’s degree in financial administration from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in economics and a PhD in business from Stanford University.

William G. Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions and saving behavior. He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. He is also director of the Retirement Security Project. From 2006 to 2009, he served as vice president of Brookings and director of the Economic Studies Program. Gale is the author of Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Prior to joining Brookings in 1992, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

He is the co-editor of several books, including Automatic: Changing the Way America Saves (Brookings 2009); Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America (Century Foundation, 2006); The Evolving Pension System: Trends, Effects, and Proposals for Reform(Brookings, 2005); Private Pensions and Public Policy (Brookings, 2004); Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation (Brookings, 2001), and Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform (Brookings, 1996).

His research has been published in several scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. In 2007, a paper he co-authored was awarded the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award Certificate of Excellence.

He has also written extensively in policy-related publications and newspapers, including op-eds in CNN, the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

Gale serves on the editorial board of several academic journals, and has served on advisory boards for the Government Accountability Office, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Joint Committee on Taxation, and on the Board of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions.

Gale attended Duke University and the London School of Economics and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987. He lives in Washington, DC, is an avid tennis player, and is a person who stutters. He is the father of two grown children.

Howard Gleckman is a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he edits the fiscal policy blog TaxVox and the daily news summary The Daily Deduction. He is also affiliated with Urban’s Program on Retirement Policy, where he works on long-term care issues.

Before joining Urban, Gleckman was senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week, where he was a 2003 National Magazine Award finalist. He was a 2006–07 media fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from 2006 to 2008.

Gleckman writes two regular columns for Forbes.com, on tax policy and elder care. He is author of the book Caring for Our Parents and speaks and writes frequently on long-term care issues.

Kim Rueben is the Sol Price fellow and director of the State and Local Finance Initiative at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Rueben is an expert on state and local public finance and the economics of education. Her work examines issues of state and local public finance and focuses on state budget and tax issues, intergovernmental relations, fiscal institutions, and the economics of education, including federal and state financing of both K–12 and postsecondary education and how decisions affect different individuals across states.

In addition to her position at the Urban Institute, Rueben is an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), serves on the board of the National Tax Association, the Washington, DC, Revenue Estimation Advisory Group, and as an advisor to Let’s Get Set, a purpose-driven fintech start-up. She works closely with state officials and has served on state tax advisory boards including in California and Washington, DC, and has testified before congressional and state legislative committees. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel that examined The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration and was on the executive board of the American Education Finance Association.

Before joining Urban, Rueben was a research fellow at the PPIC.

Rueben received a BS in applied math-economics from Brown University, an MS in economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tracy Gordon is the acting Robert C. Pozen director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, where she researches and writes about fiscal challenges facing state and local governments, including budget trade-offs, intergovernmental relations, and long-term sustainability. Before joining Urban, Gordon was a senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She was also a fellow at the Brookings Institution, assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Gordon was a member of the District of Columbia Infrastructure Task Force and the District of Columbia Tax Revision Commission. She serves on the board of trustees for the American Tax Policy Institute and the California Budget and Policy Center.

Gordon has written extensively on state and local government finances, including taxes, budgeting, intergovernmental relations, municipal debt, and pensions. She has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post and on C-SPAN, Fox Business News, and NPR. Recent publications include Assessing Fiscal Capacities of States: A Representative Revenue System–Representative Expenditure System Approach (with Richard Auxier and John Iselin); "The Federal Stimulus Programs and Their Effects" (with Gary Burtless) in The Great Recession; "State and Local Fiscal Institutions in Recession and Recovery" in the Oxford Handbook on State and Local Government Finance; and "Addressing Local Fiscal Disparities" in the Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning. Gordon holds a PhD in public policy with a concurrent MA in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, researches, speaks, and writes on a range of federal income tax issues, with a particular focus on business taxes. In 2013, he also was the staff director of the DC Tax Revision Commission.

Before joining Urban, Rosenthal practiced tax law in Washington, DC, for over 25 years, most recently as a partner at Ropes and Gray. He was a legislation counsel with the Joint Committee on Taxation, where he helped draft tax rules for financial institutions, financial products, capital gains, and related areas. He is the former chair of the Taxation Section of the District of Columbia Bar Association.

Rosenthal holds an AB and JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPP from Harvard University.

Frank Sammartino is a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and an affiliate of Urban’s State and Local Finance Initiative. His current work focuses on the interaction among federal, state, and local tax policies and on the influence of tax and transfer policies on income inequality.

Sammartino has written extensively about federal tax and retirement policy issues. In an earlier stint at Urban, he designed and developed the initial version of the Tax Policy Center microsimulation model, which researchers use to analyze how federal tax policies affect federal revenues and families at different income levels. He also led a team of researchers in developing a new version of the Dynamic Simulation of Income Model, which Urban researchers use to analyze how public policies and economic and demographic forces shape retirement income security.

Before returning to Urban, Sammartino completed a 20-year career at the Congressional Budget Office, serving most recently as the assistant director for tax analysis. He also has served as chief economist and deputy director at the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress.

Sammartino holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Boston College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, respectively.

Elaine Maag is a principal research associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she studies income support programs for low-income families and children.

Before joining Urban, Maag worked at the Internal Revenue Service and Government Accountability Office as a Presidential Management Fellow. She has advised congressional staff on the taxation of families with children, higher education incentives in the tax code, and work incentives in the tax code. Maag codirected the creation of the Net Income Change Calculator, a tool that allows users to understand the trade-offs between tax and transfer benefits, and changes in earnings or marital status.

Maag holds an MS in public policy analysis from the University of Rochester.

Eric Toder is an Institute fellow and codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute.  In his current position, he oversees the modeling team at the Tax Policy Center; serves as its leading expert on corporate and international tax and tax compliance issues; and authors and directs research studies. 

Toder has published articles on a wide variety of tax policy and retirement policy issues, including corporate tax reform, distributional effects of tax expenditures, carbon taxes, value-added taxes, net benefits of Social Security taxes and spending, tax compliance, and the effects of saving incentives.

Before joining Urban, Toder held a number of senior-level positions in tax policy offices in the US government and overseas, including service as deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of the Treasury; director of research at the Internal Revenue Service; deputy assistant director for the Office of Tax Analysis at the Congressional Budget Office; and consultant to the New Zealand Treasury.  He has also served as a part-time consultant to the International Monetary Fund and serves as treasurer of the National Tax Association.

Toder received his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester in 1971.