Roger H. Gordon
ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher
Roger H. Gordon, University of California, San Diego, CESifo Guest from 18 to 31 March 2019.
Richard Musgrave Visiting Professorship 2019
Professor Roger H. Gordon is the CESifo and IIPF Richard Musgrave Guest Professor 2019. He graduated from Harvard and received a PhD in Economics from MIT. He was an Assistant Professor at Princeton, before moving on to Bell Labs, where he was a Member of the Technical Staff. He then had a tenure as Professor of Economics and the University of Michigan and is now Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego.
Roger H. Gordon has worked in the areas of finance, health economics, development economics, microeconomic theory and pubic economics. His research has covered a broad range of questions dealing with the effects of tax policy on firm and individual behavior as well as the implications of these responses for the design of tax policy. He has also examined the role of tax policy in economic development, with an initial focus on China and more recently on the development process more broadly.
In addition to his teaching positions, he is currently Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature, an Associate Editor of CESifo Economic Studies, a past editor of the Journal of Public Economics, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research as well as the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a CESifo Research Network Fellow and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Gallen in 2005.
Why is Capital so Immobile Internationally?
In a frequently cited article, co-authored with Lans Bovenberg, Roger H. Gordon sought to explain why, contrary to theory, capital is internationally immobile. Their model of asymmetric information distribution led to the explanation that investors must pay disproportionately high risk premiums on foreign investments and therefore prefer to invest in a balanced portfolio of securities of domestic internationally active companies. The authors then discussed the effects of this model in the context of optimal taxation, in particular with regard to government incentives for capital imports.
