James R. Hines Jr. (born July 9, 1958) is an American economist and a founder of academic research into corporate-focused tax havens, and the effect of U.S. corporate tax policy on the behaviors of U.S. multinationals. He currently serves as the Richard A. Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics and the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.

Hines is the most cited author on the research of tax havens, and his work on tax havens was relied upon by the CEA when drafting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. His papers were some of the first to analyse profit shifting, and to establish quantitative features of tax havens. Hines showed that being a tax haven could be a prosperous strategy for a jurisdiction, and controversially, that tax havens can promote economic growth. Hines showed that use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals had maximized long-term U.S. exchequer tax receipts, at the expense of other jurisdictions.

James Hines was born in Chicago in 1958. He attended Yale University for his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in 1980. He completed his PhD in Harvard University in 1986. After various teaching and research posts in Princeton University and Harvard University, in 1997 he became Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. Hines is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research director of the International Tax Policy Forum.

Hines has testified to Congress on public tax policy on a number of occasions, and is quoted on related issues by the financial media, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ("TCJA").

In February 1994, Hines and his Harvard PhD student, Eric M. Rice, published their 1990 National Bureau of Economic Research ("NBER") working paper (No. 3477), in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, on the use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals, which contained a number of important findings.

The 1994 Hines-Rice paper is recognised as the first important paper into BEPS and tax havens, and it is the most cited research paper in history on tax havens. The 1994 Hines-Rice paper has been cited by all subsequent most cited research papers into tax havens, including by Desai, Dharmapala, Slemrod, and Zucman.

The two most recent U.S. congressional investigations into tax havens: the 2008 investigation by the Government Accountability Office, and the 2015 investigation by the Congressional Research Service, identify the 1994 Hines-Rice paper as the first credible list of global tax havens, and the first quantitative analysis of what constitutes a tax haven.

His subsequent 2007–2011 papers on tax havens showed that major tax havens, including Ireland, Singapore, Bermuda, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, were well governed and prosperous economies, from being tax havens: Tax havens are successful players in the world economy. He also asserted that tax havens could stimulate economic activity in nearby high-tax countries, by addressing issues in their tax systems, however this conclusion has been controversial and has drawn criticism from advocates of tax justice as being supportive of corporate tax avoidance by multinationals.