Yilin Hou is a professor of public finance at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, with a focus on budgeting mechanisms and the real property tax. He holds a B.A. from Hebei Normal University (1985), an M.A. from Tsinghua University, China (1988); M.A. (1998), and PhD (2002) in public administration from Syracuse. He held faculty positions in applied linguistics at Tsinghua University (1988-1997), then in public administration at Rutgers University Newark (2002-2003), the University of Georgia (2003-2013), and Syracuse (2013-present). At Georgia, he was Stanley W. Shelton Professor of Public Finance; at Syracuse, he is Maxwell Tenth Decade Faculty Scholar. Besides numerous scholarly articles, his books include State Government Budget Stabilization (2013), Local Government Budget Stabilization (2015), Research in Scheme Design of Property Taxation (in Chinese, 2016) and Development, Governance, and Real Property Tax in China (2018). He also publishes extensively on Chinese public finance with numerous recognitions for this work.