Wallace Oates

Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 301-405-3496
Email: oates@econ.umd.edu

Wallace Oates is a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and a University Fellow at Resources for the Future.  He received his Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford in 1965 and joined the faculty at Princeton University. He began at Maryland in 1979. He teaches in the areas of public economics and environmental economics.

His primary research interests are public finance and environmental economics.  Since his first book, Fiscal Federalism (1972), he has explored the assignment of functions to different levels of government in a federal system, the provision of local public goods, the design of intergovernmental grants, and the structure of local revenue systems.  He worked on these matters with urban groups, the European Union, the OECD, and various federal and state agencies in the United States. 

His central environmental economics interest is in the use of economic incentives for environmental management.  In numerous writings including The Theory of Environmental Policy (1975, revised edition 1988), with William Baumol, he studied the design and implementation of taxes on polluting activities and systems of tradable emissions allowances.  He worked on the design of regulatory programs for pollution control with the U.S. EPA, the OECD, and other federal and state agencies.  He served on the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee for the EPA. 

A CV and a homepage are also available.