Jacobs is an internationally renowned scholar in public finance and a research fellow of the Tinbergen Institute and CESifo. Jacobs' research crosses the borders of public finance, optimal taxation, welfare economics, macroeconomics, human capital theory, environmental economics and labor economics. He has published on optimal taxation and income redistribution, the marginal cost of public funds, optimal capital income taxation, human capital and optimal education policy, environmental tax policy, macro-economic policy, labor markets and wage inequality, fiscal policy, economic growth, and technological change.
In recent research, he studies the political economy of income taxation, capital income taxation, indirect redistribution mechanisms, such as minimum wages and labor unions, the distributional consequences of technological change, and stabilization policy.
Jacobs has been a visiting fellow of, among others, the universities of Chicago, Munich, California at Berkeley, and of the International Monetary Fund. He has been the Wim Duisenberg fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2018-2019. He has also been consultant to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
SBE dean professor Arjen van Witteloostuijn: "I am extremely pleased that Bas Jacobs will further strengthen our already very strong Economics group. He is a very sharp thinker – a fine scholar who actively participates in important public debates, using insights from high-quality research, including his own. I really am looking forward to working with him."
Bas Jacobs has lucid writing skills and has the ability to clearly explain complex economic issues. He is an important contributor to the Dutch economic policy debate. Jacobs writes regularly in the Dutch monthly Vrij Nederland. He has written dozens of applied policy articles in national journals, books in Dutch and English on income redistribution and taxation (De Prijs van Gelijkheid, 2015, Prometheus-Bert Bakker; Tax by Design for the Netherlands, 2022, Oxford University Press), and hundreds of opinion articles and blogs.
From 2007-2022 Jacobs has been Professor of Economics and Public Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam. From 2005-2007 Jacobs was assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Tilburg. In 2004-2005 Jacobs was Jean-Monet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He held a post-doc position at the University of Amsterdam from 2002-2005. From 1997 to 2004 Jacobs also worked as a researcher at the CPB Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
More information can be found on his personal homepage: https://jacobs73.home.xs4all.nl/.