John C. Haltiwanger is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1981. After serving on the faculty of UCLA and Johns Hopkins, he joined the faculty at Maryland in 1987. In the late 1990s, he served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Census Bureau. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau. He has played a major role in developing and studying U.S. longitudinal firm-level data. Using these data, he has developed new statistical measures and analyzed the determinants of firm-level job creation, job destruction and economic performance. He has explored the implications of these firm dynamics for aggregate U.S. productivity growth and for the U.S. labor market. The statistical and measurement methods he has helped develop to measure and study firm dynamics have been increasingly used by many statistical agencies around the world. His own research increasingly uses the data and measures on firm dynamics from a substantial number of advanced, emerging and transition economies. He has published more than 100 academic articles and numerous books including Job Creation and Destruction (with Steven Davis and Scott Schuh, MIT Press). He was awarded the 2013 Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2001.