Robert Shimer is the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics by the Society of Labor Economics in 2010. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research's Economic Fluctuations and Growth Group, and a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He is the recipient of six research grants from the National Science Foundation and a Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is also the editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Shimer's research is on labor markets and macroeconomics. Most of it has focused on search frictions but he has also explored the mismatch between workers' human capital and geographic location and the skill requirements and location of available jobs.

Shimer received a B.A. in Economics from Yale University in 1990, an M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Princeton University from 1996 until he moved to the University of Chicago in 2003.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in October 2010.