Christoph M. Schmidt, born in 1962, studied economics at the University of Mannheim, Germany, where he received his degree as Diplom-Volkswirt in 1987, at Princeton University, where he received his M.A. in 1989 and his Ph.D. in 1991, and at the University of Munich, where he received the degree of Dr. rer. pol. habil. in 1995.


Since 2002 he is president of the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Essen and professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Since 2009 he is member of the German Council of Economic Experts. In 2011 he was appointed as amember of the Enquete-Commission “Wachstum, Wohlstand, Lebensqualität” (“Growth, Welfare, Quality of Live”) of the German Bundestag.

From 1995 to 2002 he taught econometrics and labor economics as a Full Professor at the University of Heidelberg. Schmidt was awarded a Princeton University Fellowship, 1987-1990, the Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 1990-1991, and was a fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) 1992-1995. Since 1992, he has been a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, since 1996 a CEPR Research Fellow, and since 1998 he is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn.


His research interests include applied econometrics, in particular in labor and population economics; he serves as an Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and has published articles in journals such as The Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Public Economics.