John L. Mikesell received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois. He is chancellor's professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington. His work on government finance and taxation has appeared in journals such as National Tax Journal; Public Budgeting and Finance (for which he serves as editor-in-chief); Public Finance Quarterly; Southern Economic Journal; Public Administration Review; Public Choice; International Journal of Public Administration; and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting, and Financial Management. Dr. Mikesell is co-author of Sales Taxation, State and Local Structure and Administration (Urban Institute Press). His distinguished career includes serving as chief fiscal economist on the USAID Barents Group/KPMG Peat Marwick fiscal reform project with the Government of Ukraine (1995) and as director for assistance in intergovernmental fiscal relations with the USAID Georgia State University Consortium Russian fiscal reform project (1998-99). He directed U.S. Department of State supported public administration partnerships involving institutions in the U.S. and Russia, and he has worked on fiscal studies for several states, including New York, Minnesota, Indiana, and Hawaii; as consultant on World Bank missions to several countries; and as a senior research fellow, Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy in Beijing. Dr. Mikesell received the 2002 Wildavsky Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement in Public Budgeting and Finance from the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management.