Martin Halla is currently Full Professor of Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria; a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) in Bonn, Germany; and a Permanent Scientific Consultant at the Austrian National 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 University of Innsbruck. In 2017, he returned to the JKU Linz, where he was Head of the Institute of Economic Policy at the Department of Economics until 2023.

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 Labor Economics, 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.