Chris William Sanchirico

Chris William Sanchirico is the Samuel A. Blank Professor of Law, Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School. He is a leading expert on tax law and policy.

Sanchirico was born in the Bronx, New York and grew up in Wayne, New Jersey where he attended the Wayne public schools. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Basilicata, Italy, a region whose contemporaneous poverty and backwardness are depicted in Carlo Levi’s classic memoir, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945).

Sanchirico earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Princeton University where he majored in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and was named one of two Woodrow Wilson Scholars in his senior year. He earned his J.D. at Yale Law School and his Ph.D. (in economics) at Yale University, where his studies focused on game theory, mathematical economics, and public economics. His dissertation on game theory was published in one of the field’s leading journals, Econometrica.

Sanchirico’s research and teaching combine mathematical and legal-institutional sophistication to a degree that is relatively rare among economists and legal scholars. He has published extensively in preeminent journals in the fields of tax law and policy, evidence, procedure, law and economics, public economics, game theory, and mathematical economics. He has presented his work widely at law schools, economics departments, business schools, and statistics departments. His course offerings include Federal Income Taxation, Taxation of Business Entities, International Taxation, Evidence, Mathematical Game Theory (Ph.D. level), Intermediate Microeconomics, Mathematical Methods (Ph.D. level), and Law and Economics.

In 2009 Sanchirico visited Università di Bologna where he was Visiting Scholar at La Facoltà di Economia, Senior Fellow at Istituto di Studi Avanzati, and Erasmus Mundus Scholar. Sanchirico has served as the Chair of the Evidence Section of the Association of American Law Schools and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association. Sanchirico is one of the founding Co-Directors of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Tax Law and Policy. He is also the founding editor of two eJournals, Evidence and Evidentiary Procedure and Economic Inequality and the Law, and an Advisory Editor of the University of Bologna Law Review, a general student-edited law journal published by the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Bologna.

Tax Law and Policy

A Counter-Reply to Bankman and Weisbach, 64 Tax Law Review 551 (2011)

Tax Eclecticism, 64 Tax Law Review 149 (2011)

A Critical Look at the Economic Argument for Taxing Only Labor Income, 63 Tax Law Review 867 (2010)

Progressivity and Potential Income: Measuring the Effect of Changing Work Patterns on Income Tax Progressivity, 108 Columbia Law Review 1551 (2008)

The Tax Advantage to Paying Private Equity Fund Managers With Profit Shares: What is it? Why is it Bad? 75 University of Chicago Law Review 1071 (2008)

Inequality and Uncertainty: Theory and Legal Applications, 155 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 279 (2006) (with Matthew Adler)

Taxes versus Legal Rules as Instruments for Equity: A More Equitable View, 29 Journal of Legal Studies 797 (2000)

Legal Evidence and Procedure

Evidence, Procedure, and the Upside of Cognitive Error, 57 Stanford Law Review 291 (2004)

Character Evidence and the Object of Trial, 101 Columbia Law Review 1227 (2001)

Detection Avoidance, 81 NYU Law Review 1331 (2006)

Game Theory and Probability

A Probabilistic Model of Learning in Games, 64 Econometrica 1375 (1996)

Collusion and Price Rigidity, 71 Review of Economic Studies 317 (2004) (with Susan Athey & Kyle Bagwell)