In the past twenty years, the field of public finance has undergone a dramatic evolution, with a growing interest in the study of transfer programs and social insurance.  The field has also moved from predominantly theoretic approaches to putting more emphasis on high-quality empirical work, both in the traditional areas of tax and direct spending and in the newer areas of transfer programs and social insurance.   Jonathan Gruber's Public Finance and Public Policy is the first text to acknowledge those changes.  Written specifically with those developments in mind, it brings the realities of contemporary public finance to the classroom in ways no other text can match.