Kim Rueben is the Sol Price fellow and director of the State and Local Finance Initiative at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Rueben is 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. She serves on a Council of Economic Advisors for the Controller of the State of California and a National Academy of Sciences panel on the economic and fiscal consequences of immigration, and she was on the DC Tax Revision Commission in 2013. In addition to her position at Urban, Kim is an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

Before joining Urban, Kim was a research fellow at the PPIC. She has served as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley; as a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank; and as a member of the executive board of the American Education Finance Association.

Kim 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.