David Moss

David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit. He earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Yale.  In 1992-1993, he served as a senior economist at Abt Associates. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in July 1993.

Professor Moss’s early research focused on economic policy and especially the government’s role as a risk manager. He has published three books on these subjects: Socializing Security: Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social Policy (Harvard University Press, 1996), which traces the intellectual and institutional origins of the American welfare state; When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Harvard University Press, 2002), which explores the government’s pivotal role as a risk manager in policies ranging from limited liability law to federal disaster relief; and A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), a primer on macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy. In addition to these books, he has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and case studies, mainly in the fields of institutional and policy history, financial history, political economy, and regulation.

Over more recent years, Professor Moss has devoted increasing attention to questions concerning government regulation, economic inequality, and democratic governance. One notable article from 2009, “An Ounce of Prevention: Financial Regulation, Moral Hazard, and the End of ‘Too Big to Fail’” (Harvard Magazine, Sept-Oct 2009), grew out of his research on financial regulation for the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. He has also co-edited three volumes on economic regulation since 2009, including most recently Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, co-edited with Daniel Carpenter (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Professor Moss’s latest book, Democracy: A Case Study (Harvard University Press, 2017), grew out of a course he created for Harvard undergraduates and business school students on the history of American democracy.  Both the course and the historical case studies on which it is based are now being brought to high schools as part of the High School Case Method Project, which Professor Moss oversees at Harvard Business School.

Moss is the founder of the Tobin Project, a nonprofit research organization that has received the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. He is also a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Honors include the Robert F. Greenhill Award, the Editors’ Prize from the American Bankruptcy Law Journal, the Student Association Faculty Award for outstanding teaching at the Harvard Business School (eight times), and the American Risk and Insurance Association’s Annual Kulp-Wright Book Award for the “most influential text published on the economics of risk management and insurance.”