119th Annual Conference – Keynote Speakers

James Alm is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Tulane University. He has also taught at Georgia State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Syracuse University. His teaching and research interests lie in the area of public economics, and 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. Recently, he was President of the Southern Economic Association, and he received its Distinguished Fellow Award in 2023. He has been especially active in the National Tax Association, including serving as its President in 2020-2021 and receiving its Daniel M. Holland Medal in 2025.

 

Gary “Hoov” Hoover is the Executive Director of the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. He is also a professor of economics and is an affiliate professor of law. Dr. Hoover received his Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. He has published numerous scholarly research papers, book chapters, books on topics concerning income redistribution/poverty and political economy. He is the author of the book Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead. Dr. Hoover was the co-chair of the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession from 2011 to 2024. From 2022 to 2023 he was the president of the Southern Economic Association. Dr. Hoover is the founding and current editor of the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy. Dr. Hoover is a network member at the Center for Economic Studies & IFO Institute in Munich, Germany. He has also been a guest professor at the Universities of Hannover and Konstanz in Germany, the University of Vienna in Austria and X’ian University in China.

 

 Alex Rees-Jones is an Associate Professor in the Business Economics and Public Policy Department at Wharton. He also serves on the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review, as an Associate Editor at Management Science, as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and as a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University in 2013 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2014. In his research, Alex explores the ways in which psychological biases and imperfect cognition affect economic policy analysis. A major area of application is public finance, examining how citizen’s imperfect responses to tax incentives affect the assessment of tax policy.

Sally Wallace, Managing Director, Ernst & Young LLP, focuses on public finance in the US and in developing countries. Prior to joining the firm, she was Dean of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She started her career as a financial economist with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. She is helping the Quantitative Economics and Statistics group expand its international footprint in the areas of public finance management, impact evaluation and economic analysis. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.