Ludger Woessmann

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Ludger Woessmann

Professor of Economics, University of Munich
Director, Ifo Center for the Economics of Education

Bio and Research Interest

Ludger Woessmann is Professor of Economics at the University of Munich and Director of the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the Ifo Institute. His main research interests are the determinants of long-run prosperity and of student achievement. He uses microeconometric methods to answer applied, policy-relevant questions of the empirical economics of education, often using international student achievement tests. Special focusses address the importance of education for economic prosperity – individual and societal, historical and modern – and the importance of institutions of the school systems for efficiency and equity. Further research topics cover aspects of economic history, economics of religion, and the Internet. His work was rewarded, among others, with the Gossen Prize of the German Economic Association, the Young Economist Award of the European Economic Association, the EIB Prize of the European Investment Bank, and the Bruce H. Choppin Memorial Award of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.

Woessmann studied economics at Marburg University, the University of Kent at Canterbury, and the Advanced Studies Program of the Kiel Institute for World Economics, where he subsequently worked. He received his PhD from the University of Kiel. He held the 2010 National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and spent extended research visits at Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is Fellow of the International Academy of Education, Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), and the Academic Advisory Council of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, Chairman of the Research Committee on Economics of Education of the German Economic Association, and coordinator of the European Expert Network on the Economics of Education (EENEE). He is co-editor of the Handbook of the Economics of Education and co-organizer of the annual CESifo Area Conference on the Economics of Education and held over 250 invited presentations. Among his over 250 academic publications are 75 articles in refereed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Public Economics, as well as several books. His research is regularly covered by the national and international media.

Recent Positions and honors

W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 2010; Visiting Scholar, 2014-15

Member, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina

Member, Academic Advisory Council, Federal Ministry of Economics, Germany

Gossen Prize of the German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik)

IEA Bruce H. Choppin Memorial Award of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)

Young Economist Award of the European Economic Association

PhD

“Schooling and the Quality of Human Capital”, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany, 2001

Publications

The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth (with E.A. Hanushek). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015

Handbook of the Economics of Education, Vol. 5 (edited with E.A. Hanushek and S. Machin), Amsterdam: North Holland, 2016

Knowledge Capital, Growth, and the East Asian Miracle (with E.A. Hanushek). Science 351 (6271): 344-345, 2016

The Importance of School Systems: Evidence from International Differences in Student Achievement. Journal of Economic Perspectives 30 (3): 3-31, 2016

Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History (with S.O. Becker). Quarterly Journal of Economics 124 (2): 531-596, 2009