Biography
James Alm is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Tulane University, after serving as Chair of the Department of Economics for nearly 10 years. Before moving to Tulane, he was Regents Professor in the Department of Economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, where he worked as Chair of the Department and Dean of the School. He has also taught at Syracuse University and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Over his 40 years of teaching at these institutions, Alm was the main faculty supervisor on over 40 doctoral student dissertations and another 20 masters student theses, and he was a member of another 70 graduate student committees. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Economics at Earlham College, his master’s degree in Economics at the University of Chicago, and his doctorate in Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Alm’s teaching and research interests lie in the area of public economics. Much of his research has focused on the behavioral, distributional, allocative, and revenue effects of taxes, with a particular focus on tax compliance, the income tax treatment of the family, and fiscal federalism. His most recent work has examined the disparate impact by race ethnicity, and gender of the U.S. income tax code. He has also worked on tax and fiscal decentralization reforms in many countries around the world, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jamaica, Grenada, Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, China, the Philippines, Russia, Uganda, Nigeria, India, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Nepal, Ukraine, Pakistan, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Tunisia. He has published over 200 papers in leading academic journals, as well as another 100 book chapters, sponsored reports, and conference proceedings, including opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tax Notes, and The Hill. He is also the author or editor of 10 books. He was the long-serving Editor of Public Finance Review. Recently, he was President of the Southern Economic Association, and he received its Distinguished Fellow Award in 2023. Alm has been especially active in the National Tax Association, including serving as its President in 2020-2021. He was recently awarded the Daniel M. Holland Medal by the National Tax Association, which is its most prestigious award and which recognizes lifetime achievement in the study of the theory and practice of public finance.
Links to his research can be found at:
https://ideas.repec.org/e/pal49.html
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaCGaF4AAAAJ&hl=en
Interests
• Public Economics
• Taxation
• Public Finance in Developing Countries