Erling Barth is Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISF) in Oslo and Professor II at the Department of Economics, University of Oslo, associated with the center Equality, Social Organsization and Performance (ESOP). He is Research Economist at NBER, Cambridge, MA, and Wertheim Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard University. His PhD is from the Department of Economics at the University of Oslo. He has been Research Associate at the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California at Berkeley (1991-92) and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Economics, Harvard University and the NBER in Cambridge, MA (1998-99, 2008-10). He has been an editor and co-editor of the Nordic Journal of Political Economy and of Søkelys på arbeidsmarkedet (Spotlight on the labour market).

He has been a member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE)(2000-08).

His research interests include education, productivity, technological change, the wage structure, gender wage differentials, labour mobility, firms’ behaviour and the impact of labour market institutions. His research is published in the American Economic Review, Journal of the European Economic Association, the American Journal of Political Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Corporate Finance, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review among others.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in December 2004.