Matt Weinzierl is Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at Harvard Business School, where he is the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 2022 through 2025, he served as Faculty Chair of the MBA Program at HBS, where he also teaches courses on economic policy and the space sector. His research focuses on the optimal design of economic policy, in particular taxation, with an emphasis on better understanding the philosophical principles underlying policy choices, and on the commercialization of the space sector and its economic implications. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at Harvard University in 2008, Professor Weinzierl served as the Staff Economist for Macroeconomics on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and worked in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.  

Professor Weinzierl has written on a range of topics in optimal taxation and optimal economic policy more generally. His work in Positive Optimal Tax Theory has focused on identifying and formalizing the goals for tax policy that hold sway among the public, political and economic leaders, and leading tax thinkers, and then characterizing the implications of using those objectives in the analysis of optimal taxation.

Professor Weinzierl currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research. He previously served as Senior Associate Dean, Chair of the MBA Program and as Chair of the MBA Required Curriculum (RC). Prior to those positions, he was the coursehead for Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE), an RC course, and Chair of MBA Community Standards and the Conduct Review Board at HBS. He has created and currently teaches two courses in the Elective Curriculum: The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME) and Space, Public and Commercial Economics (SPACE).