Professor James R. Hines Jr. has been reappointed as the Richard A. Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics for a five-year term, effective September 1, 2026, through August 31, 2031.
Collegiate professorships are awarded by the LSA Executive Committee and are named after distinguished former faculty members. Musgrave was a faculty member at the U-M from 1948-1959. After earning his Ph.D. at Harvard, Musgrave taught there for a few years before joining the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He left the Fed after six years to resume teaching, this time at the U-M Department of Economics.
Musgrave is one of the 20th century's most influential public finance scholars, whose groundbreaking work at the University of Michigan transformed the field through his seminal contributions to public finance theory. During his U-M years he wrote his revolutionary The Theory of Public Finance, which changed the way future generations of researchers conceptualized key questions in this field. He published several books, tax progressivity, taxation and risk-taking, taxation and distributive justice, fiscal federalism, and the role of fiscal policy in stabilizing the economy represent major contributions in the field.
Hines is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, where he also holds appointments in the Law School as the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law and serves as Research Director of the business school’s Office of Tax Policy Research. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, research director of the International Tax Policy Forum, former co-editor of the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives. He earned a B.A. and M.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, all in economics. Before joining the University of Michigan in 1997, he taught at Princeton University and Harvard University, and has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of California - Berkeley, and Harvard Law School.
An internationally recognized expert in public finance, taxation, and law and economics, Hines has made significant contributions to the study of tax policy and its economic effects. His reappointment recognizes his continued excellence in research, teaching, and leadership in the field.
