Zohal Hessami is a non-tenured Professor for Applied Political Economy at the University of Mannheim and an affiliate of the CESifo research network. Before she was a Junior Professor for Political Economy at the University of Konstanz. She visited Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona in 2014 and the University of Cambridge in 2013 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim in 2012. She pursued her undergraduate studies at Maastricht University and Université de Montréal until July 2006. She received her Doctorate in Economics from the University of Konstanz in January 2011.

Her research focuses on applied empirical research in the fields of Political Economy, Public Economics and Applied Microeconometrics covering a broad range of policy-relevant topics such as political business cycles in local public finances, determinants of individual voting behavior, globalization and public policy, political selection, gender economics as well as the consequences of European monetary integration. Her research has been widely published in journals such as the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Zohal Hessami joined IZA as a Research Fellow in October 2019.