Kai A. Konrad completed his doctoral studies in 1990 and habilitated in 1993 at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität in Munich. From 1994 to 2009, he was a university professor in the Department of Economics at the Free University of Berlin, and from 2001 to 2009, he was also the director of the Department of Market Processes and Governance at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). Since 2009, he has been a scientific member of the Max Planck Society, serving as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law from 2009 to 2010, and since 2011, as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.

Since 1999, Konrad has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Federal Ministry of Finance, serving as its chair from 2011 to 2014.

He is a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, the German Academy of Engineering Sciences (acatech), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Academia Europaea.

He is on the editorial boards of several international journals in Economics and Political Science, including being one of the two founding editors of Economics of Governance and serving as co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics from 2007 to 2018.

Kai Konrad's research covers a wide range of topics from the fields of economics, public finance, political science, theoretical biology, and operations research. In his academic work, he has focused on subjects such as interstate tax and system competition, the European sovereign debt crisis, energy policy issues related to climate change, and competition for economic or social status.

Since the early 2020s, he has focused on the increasingly antagonistic economic and political relationship between the USA and China and the question of how smaller countries or the EU can act sensibly in this conflict.

Kai Konrad joined IZA as Research Fellow in August 1999.