David Bell is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Stirling, Scotland and the Budget Adviser to the Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament. He studied economics at the University of Aberdeen and the London School of Economics. After a spell at the University of St Andrews, he joined the University of the Strathlyde, where he wrote his PhD. He joined the Macroeconomic Modeling Bureau at the University of Warwick in the early 1980s, and then was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow. He joined Stirling in 1990 and since then, his main interests have been in labour economics, fiscal decentralization and the economics of social care. He has published widely and has acted widely as an adviser to policymakers.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in June 2009.