Phineas Baxandall

Mr. Baxandall oversees policy and strategy development for state PIRGs’ tax and budget campaigns throughout the U.S., including transportation campaignst. He comes to the PIRGs from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government where he assisted in directing the Taubman Center for State and Local Government as well as the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. In that capacity he assisted the city of Somerville, Massachusetts with performance management and best-practice budgeting, as well as served as a technical advisor for the Massachusetts’ Metropolitan Mayors’ Coalition report on reforming local aid, which was credited for helping to restore local aid funding within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Before coming to the Kennedy School, Baxandall worked for the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, editing their flagship publication, Regional Review. He also taught political economy for several years at Harvard’s undergraduate honors program in Social Studies, where he won six teaching awards. In 1990-91, he taught economics and organizational behavior at the University of Budapest. In Hungary, Baxandall also worked with an American campaign consulting firm to observe focus groups, formulate survey questions, and prepare national strategy for a major political party in Parliament.

He has authored or co-authored several reports, academic journal articles, or magazine features on a variety of issues in political economy. These include, "Finding Solutions to Fund Transit: Combining Accountability And New Resources For World Class Public Transportation"and "Sunshine for California: Shining Light On Corporate Tax Secrecy For Healthier State Budgets, Investments and Markets, as well as "Betting on the Future: The Economic Impact of Legalized Gambling," "Cross-Sector Collaboration in Massachusetts," "Local Service, Local Aid, Common Challenges," "Three Worlds of Working Time: The Partisan and Welfare Politics of Work-Hours in OECD Countries," "Spending #1, Performance #37: How the U.S. Ranks Internationally Using World Health Organization Data," "Good Capital, Bad Capital: Dangers and Development in Digital Diasporas," "Road Privatization: Explaining the Trend, Assessing the Facts, and Protecting the Public," "A Better Way to Go: Meeting America's 21st Century Transportation Challenges with Modern Public Transit," "Squandering the Stimulus: An Analysis of Household Gas Spending, Economic Stimulus Checks, and the Need for Better Transportation Options," "Economic Stimulus or Simply More Misguided Spending? ," "How and Why to Fund Public Transportation," "Private Roads, Public Costs," "Transparency.gov 2.0," and a book from Ashgate Press, Constructing Unemployment.

Education: Ph.D., Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000, B.A., Economics and College of Social Studies, Wesleyan University, 1989