Herwig Immervoll is Senior Economist and Head of Social Benefits and Green Transition at the OECD. He has headed policy dialogue and research projects on climate-change mitigation, social protection and safety nets, on poverty alleviation and redistribution policies, and on minimum wages, unemployment protection and employment support. He has initiated or co-led World Bank policy analyses in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region on population ageing and pensions, employment activation and tax/transfer policies. He has also led employment and social policy reviews of countries seeking to join the OECD as part of its Accession process.
He has held earlier staff positions at the World Bank and at the University of Cambridge, where he had a major role in developing EUROMOD, the EU-wide tax-benefit model. He is a Research Fellow at the the IZA in Bonn and a Research Associate/Affiliate at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER, University of Essex). He also served on the Board of Governors of the Foundation of International Studies on Social Security (FISS), and was a member of the GINI research network. He has worked extensively on microsimulation methods and their application to policy analysis and evaluation.
In addition to his policy work he remains active in research and has published in leading academic journals including Energy Policy, Economic Journal, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Inequality, Review of Income and Wealth.
Recent and current ongoing work includes distributional impacts of climate change and mitigation, social spending and fiscal policy, options for adapting social protection to a "future of work", developing tools to support people-centered employment-support policies, examining the consequences of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), and implications of economic crises for employment and social policies.
Herwig is Austrian and holds a PhD in economics, as well as Masters degrees in economics (development and public finance) and in business administration (IT and personnel management).
He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in December 2004.
