Prof. Yilin Hou 侯一麟教授

Professor of Department of Public Administration and International Affairs
Maxwell School’s Tenth Decade Faculty Scholar
Syracuse University, USA
美國西拉丘斯（雪城）大學
公共行政及國際事務系教授、麥克斯維爾學院百年紀念學者

Prof. Yilin Hou holds MA and Ph.D degrees in public administration from Syracuse University (State of New York, United States of America). He was the Stanley W. Shelton Professor of Public Finance at the University of Georgia (2009-2013). Since 2013, he has been a professor at the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. He is now a Maxwell School’s Tenth Decade Faculty Scholar.

Prof. Hou’s field of expertise is public finance and public budgeting. His research interests are fiscal policy, public budgeting, and intergovernmental fiscal relations as related to the core of development and governance. Much of his research focuses on the smooth operation of government finance across the boom-bust cycles of the economy. He is particularly interested in researching rules-based, time-consistent fiscal policies that will contribute to how the government sector can well weather the vicissitudes of economic fluctuations and other aspects of the society in order to provide smooth and stable public services and goods. He is well known for his theoretical and empirical research on the design, mechanisms, and impacts of budget stabilization funds and balanced budget requirements in the United States.

In recent years, Prof. Hou has been engaged in designing a local property tax system for Mainland China and conducting related empirical research. His next project is to examine the interaction of local debt and local revenues in China.

Selected Books and Recent Journal Articles

1. Hou, Yilin, Qiang Ren and Haitao Ma. 2016. Research in Scheme Design of China’s Local Property Tax. (in Chinese) Beijing: Economic Science Press. 
2. Hou, Yilin (ed). 2015. Local Government Budget Stabilization: Explorations and Evidence. New York: Springer.
3. Hou, Yilin, Qiang Ren, and Ping Zhang. 2014. The Property Tax in China: History, Pilots, and Prospects. (in Chinese) Beijing: Science Press. 
4. Hou, Yilin. 2013. State Government Budget Stabilization: Policy, Tools and Impacts. New York: Springer. 
5. Zhang, Ping and Yilin Hou (2016).  “Ability to Pay Local Property Tax, Tax Burden Distribution and Redistributive Effects,” in Economic Research (in Chinese) (12):118-32.
6. Yilin Hou and Haitao Ma. “A Theoretical Analysis of the Design Principles and Implementation Strategies of China’s Local Property Tax.” Public Finance Research (in Chinese) 2016(2): 65-78.