Martin Halla is currently Full Professor of Economics at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria; a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany; and a Permanent Scientific Consultant at the Austrian Public Health Institute in Vienna.

He studied economics at the JKU Linz. After receiving his doctorate, he was a visiting scholar at Stockholm University and the University of California, Berkeley. After his habilitation he was Full Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of Innsbruck. In 2017, he returned to the JKU Linz, where he is now Head of the Institute of Economic Policy at the Department of Economics.

His research has been published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the European Economic Review , the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Human Resources among others. He joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in May 2005 and became a Research Fellow in December 2011.