This text on public finance for undergraduates and for public administration graduate programs describes the institutional and legal settings of finance and emphasizes the links between economic analysis and current political issues. Chapters provide an overview of government's role in the economy, and explore tools for positive and normative analysis, tax analysis, and the US revenue system. The appendix discusses basic microeconomics. This fourth edition includes new chapters on health care issues and revised material on taxation.
Harvey Rosen’s scholarly and up-to-date Public Finance continues to be the market-leading book. The book takes its readers to the frontiers of current research, yet remains accessible to undergraduates. Although it draws upon the latest research, the book never loses sight of the reality it is supposed to describe, always drawing the links between economic analysis and current political issues.
Harvey S. Rosen
Harvey S. Rosen is the John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University. He was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Rosen has been a member of Princeton's Department of Economics since 1974. He served as Chairman of the Department from 1993 to 1996, and was Co-Director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies from 1993 to 2011. From 2007 to 2011 he served as the inaugural master of Princeton’s sixth undergraduate residential college, Whitman College.
Rosen has been involved in both the graduate and undergraduate teaching programs at Princeton. In recent years, he has taught undergraduate courses in public finance, taxation, and introductory microeconomics, and graduate courses in public finance. From 1989 to 1991 Rosen's audience changed from Princeton students to federal government policy makers, when he served in the US Treasury as Deputy Assistant Secretary (Tax Analysis). During a second stint in Washington from 2003 to 2005, he served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, first as a Member and then as Chairman. In this capacity, he provided advice to the White House on a wide variety of policy issues, including tax reform, social security, health care, energy, the federal budget, and financial market regulation.
Rosen's main field of research is public finance. He has published several dozen articles in scholarly journals on this topic, and authored an undergraduate textbook on it as well. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals dealing with public finance and taxation. In 1986 he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. In 2007 he received from the National Tax Association its most prestigious award, the Daniel M. Holland Medal for distinguished lifetime contributions to the study and practice of public finance.