Maxwell School alumnus and Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs Yilin Hou has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Aaron Wildavsky Award, a lifetime achievement award named in honor of a pioneering scholar in the fields of government budgeting, public policy and policy analysis.

The annual award recipient is selected by the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management (ABFM), a nonprofit section of the American Society for Public Administration. The award will be formally announced at the ABFM’s annual meeting in Denver in late October 2023.

Hou received master’s and doctoral degrees in public administration from the Maxwell School in 1998 and 2002, respectively. He returned in 2013 as a faculty member after serving on the faculty of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and the University of Georgia. At Maxwell, he is a Tenth Decade Faculty Scholar and senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research and in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

He has extensively researched the methods and fiscal institutions used by government to stabilize expenditures for the smooth provision of public services; the balanced budget requirement as a norm and mechanism in budgeting; and the design and administration of real property tax. He has authored or co-authored over 120 journal articles, five books and a dozen chapters in co-authored books. His publications cover multiple aspects in public finance, fiscal policy, public budgeting, and property taxation for U.S. cities and counties and in other country contexts. He has also served on the editorial board of multiple academic journals and his research on property tax design and fiscal institutions has been cited by The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times and Bloomberg. 

Hou is also a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and a research associate for CESifo in Munich, Germany.

By Michael Kelly