Victor Fleischer

Carried Interest has been a talking point in tax policy for at least 20 years. It is often viewed as a loophole that if closed would bring in revenue.

@kearney_melissa Someone should look into this

It’s always exciting to identify a policy lever that can raise revenue & improve equity with little to no efficiency loss!

@DietCoke_Esq Mention the Bills = Blocked and Reported

The structure of the bar exam is not reflective of actual practice. You don’t have to just come up with an answer for an issue that could be about any of the 7-14* subjects tested under time pressure in open court. Sounds like you’ve never been to court, kinda like the Buffalo Bills and the Super Bowl

@sungilkim94 Which direction does this point for the existing research? I understand your data is better - does it tend to suggest better or worse outcomes for patients? Or just no idea? It’s a great contribution on a very important topic.

I’m excited to share our new paper (Editor’s Choice) in Health Affairs Scholar on private equity acquisitions of US hospitals. We address a core limitation in the literature: the lack of a standardized, validated dataset of PE transactions. Key findings: • We identify 141 unique PE deals involving 555 short-term acute care hospitals (across 721 hospital–deal observations), which is more than have ever been reported before. • Existing commercial databases differ substantially in deal coverage, deal type, and reporting level. • Reliance on a single source can omit valid deals and produce biased or incomplete analytic samples. • Linking transactions to stable hospital identifiers requires substantial manual verification due to system-level deals, inconsistent reporting, and identifier changes over time. Overall, accurate study of PE ownership in hospitals requires multi-source data construction, transparent validation, and careful linkage to stable identifiers; many published studies inadvertently miss a large number of deals. We make the data and code publicly available to support more accurate, transparent, and replicable research: - Paper: academic.oup.com/healthaffairss… - Data & code: github.com/sungilkim94/Ki… Special thanks to my incredible co-authors for this collaboration: Mark Naslund, Sally Wang, Abid Hasan, Elijah Huang, Hyong-gu Hwang, @ambarlaforgia, @rileyleague, @ryanmcdevitt, and Kelly Kaili Yang

@AlanMCole And I might be wrong! I don’t know much about civil service protections. I have tenure and its special inefficient protections

@AlanMCole Isn’t the real point the circumvention of civil service protections, effectively forcing many existing employees to retire or quit? Not the same as private sector decisions, though I agree a cost-benefit analysis without a political lens is useful

It's a good call, yeah. Forget the symbolic politics for a moment. There's just a very normal thing in business location strategy where firms rightly determine "no, that market is too expensive" and choose a cheaper place. This kind of decision fits with that best practice.

@agranato42 Fascinating! Curious how well everything maps on to Hansmann/transaction cost economics analysis, and what doesn’t seem to fit (presumably because of regulatory issues or regulatory arbitrage?). Send me a syllabus when you have one? And congrats on the job at UT!

Very proud and happy to see that this is up and that Texas Law students can take my seminar on Unorthodox Business Associations this fall. Always looking for more examples!

Whoever decided that a university speaker getting reimbursed for an Uber needs to complete the same supplier onboarding as a firm bidding on a $1M waste disposal contract: please rot in hell, with respect.

I interviewed 20 senior admins and profs for this story. They painted a similar picture: under Alexander, Mellon became monomaniacally obsessed with social justice, almost exclusively funding work advancing political causes at the expense of more traditional humanities work. 4/

@PatentScholar I didn’t anticipate an excise tax on new patents as part of our new R&D policy

Could be a major change to patent fee structure: Commerce is "discussing charging patent holders 1% to 5% of their overall patent value" as part of Howard Lutnick's "plans to raise revenue and narrow the government's budget deficit" wsj.com/politics/polic…

Some advice for new students entering law school: find the largest, most aggressive professor, and on the first day of class keep raising your hand to make comments that will let the other students know not to mess with you

We estimate the Senate-passed reconciliation bill increases primary deficits by $3.1 trillion over 10 years. The dynamic cost, including changes to the economy, is larger at $3.5 trillion. GDP falls by 0.3 in 10 years and falls by 4.6 in 30 years. budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/…

@johnarnold How much could we get for Camp Pendleton? I feel like selling off 20 miles of CA coastline could actually bend the curve on the deficit.

Selling federal land for housing is the first real test of Democrats' commitment to the abundance agenda, and the results aren't promising. It's easy for a politician to embrace abundance at a high level. It's much harder when there's a specific policy with tradeoffs and politics and opposition from interest groups. The GOP budget bill includes a narrowly tailored provision to sell less than 1% of federal landholdings in the West. Eligible parcels must be near existing infrastructure, have no ecological or recreational value, and be used for housing. Land must be nominated by state or local governments, which also have a right of first refusal. This is exactly the kind of decision required to make housing more plentiful and affordable. However, many Democratic politicians who publicly support abundance are loudly decrying the provision, even spreading misinformation about it. The abundance agenda only works if it's more than a campaign slogan. Politicians who claim to support it but oppose every concrete policy to increase supply are still trapped in the everything bagel.

Why would we think promotion of national unity is a proper goal for universities?

We all owe a debt of gratitude to @ProfRobAnderson for his tweets proving that tipping is customary in the industry of law teaching. #NoTaxOnTips

@SmithMatthewC Niche tweet. Love it

Does anyone on Capitol Hill realize who treated the sick during the pandemic? Who cleaned their teeth while getting breathed on from a foot away? Who assisted them in benefiting from all the mess of credits and loans and grants? It was SSTBs.

@Brendan_Duke They really are incredibly good

No matter how bad your night last night, the JCT staff's night was worse.

@goodtaxtakes Shocking

@George_A_Callas Just settle at 20k and move on already

@OrinKerr My take is a little different, tho I don’t disagree much with your answer-off-the-cuff point. I’d say that success on law school exams correlates well with the skills/talent that help one succeed in practice. Just as the LSAT correlates with One-L grades.

I was recently asked whether 3-hour law school essay exams are really testing something that legal employers can find useful, given that exams are so different from what most lawyers do in law practice. My answer below.