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 Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Health Economics, the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, and in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics among others. He joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in May 2005 and became a Research Fellow in December 2011.