E.J. McMahon

Founding Senior Fellow

Edmund J. McMahon is the Empire Center’s founding senior fellow.

McMahon’s writing and research focuses on improving New York’s economic competitiveness and promoting greater transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility in state and local government. He has authored or co-authored major studies on public pension reform, collective bargaining, population migration, budget trends and tax policy in New York. His influential “Blueprint for a Better Budget,” published in January 2010, featured a number of recommendations subsequently implemented under Governors David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo. McMahon also was a leading advocate of an across-the-board cap on property taxes in New York before it was enacted at Governor Cuomo’s initiative in 2011.

McMahon has published numerous articles and essays in publications including the Wall Street JournalThe New York TimesBarron’s, the Public Interest, the New York Post, the New York Daily NewsNewsday and the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. His frequent radio and TV interviews have included appearances on CNBC, Fox News Channel and Bloomberg News, as well as on regional cable and broadcast outlets throughout New York State.

McMahon’s professional background includes nearly 30 years as an Albany-based analyst and close observer of New York State government. As chief fiscal advisor to the Assembly Republican Conference in the early 1990s, he drafted a personal income tax reform plan that would become the basis for historic tax cuts enacted under Governor George E. Pataki. Previously, as research director of the Public Policy Institute, he worked on the Institute’s counter-budget proposals and developed the template for New York’s school report cards. He also served as a deputy commissioner in the state Department of Taxation and Finance and as a vice chancellor of the State University of New York.

McMahon is also an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which he joined in June 2000. In January 2005, he opened the Institute’s Albany-based Empire Center project, which became an independent nonprofit think tank in 2013. He was the Empire Center’s founding president and became research director in the fall of 2016.

Earlier in his career, he was a staff writer and columnist for the Albany Times Union and The Knickerbocker News.

McMahon is a graduate of Villanova University.

Latest Work

Public elementary and secondary school spending in New York reached an all-time high of $20,600 per-pupil in 2013-14 school year, topping all states and exceeding the $11,009 per-pupil national average by 87 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released today. Read More

Days after saddling New York employers with higher minimum wages and the nation's most generous paid family leave mandate, Governor Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders announced in early April that they had formed a temporary Business Regulation Council to come up with ideas for improving the business climate. The panel's recommendations are, to virtually no one's surprise, underwhelming. Read More

Remember the three-day New York City transit strike of December 2005? If you do, you must be imagining things—because, according to an official legislative filing by Assemblyman Peter Abbate, Jr. of Brooklyn, there hasn't been a transit work stoppage in the city since 1989. Read More

Seven years since the end of the Great Recession, and five years since Andrew Cuomo took office as governor, New York state’s economy is in splendid shape. That’s what the state’s ubiquitous “Open for Business” ad campaign would imply, at any rate. The facts tell a different story. Read More

From Albany to Buffalo, the New York governor’s clubby approach to economic development invites—and deserves—scrutiny. Read More

Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli just issued a set of fiscal reform proposals designed to address the continuing lack of accountability and transparency in key areas of New York's budget. While by no means representing a fiscal panacea, they are solid ideas, deserving of broad public and legislative support. Read More

New York's 2 percent local property tax levy cap has passed another important legal test, prevailing in the state's mid-level appeals court over a constitutional challenge from the state's largest teachers' union. Read More