Kim Rueben is currently working as an independent consultant on issues related to state and local taxes and budgeting.  She is the president of the National Tax Association, the leading association dedicated to advancing the theory and practice of public finance including public taxing, spending and borrowing.  She is also an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). In 2025, she was a senior advisor at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Through 2023, Rueben was the Sol Price fellow and director of the State and Local Finance Initiative at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Rueben is an economist and an expert on state and local public finance and the economics of education. Her work examines issues of state and local public finance and focuses on state budget and tax issues, intergovernmental relations, fiscal institutions, and the economics of education, including federal and state financing of both K–12 and postsecondary education and how decisions affect different individuals across states. 

Rueben has worked closely with state officials and has served on state tax advisory boards including in California, Colorado, Kansas, New York and Washington, DC, and has testified before congressional and state legislative committees. She was a consultant for the Washington DC Tax Revision Commission in 2023. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel that examined The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration and was on the executive board of the American Education Finance Association and the board of the National Tax Association. Rueben also volunteers doing taxes for low-income families through the VITA program.

Before joining Urban, Rueben was a research fellow at the PPIC. Rueben received a BS in applied math-economics from Brown University, an MS in economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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