Katrin Sommerfeld is a researcher at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW, Mannheim, Germany).

Her research interests are economic effects from immigration on receiving countries with a focus on labor market impacts.

She has been head of ZEW’s Junior Research Group “Integration of Migrants and Attitudes towards the Welfare State (IMES)” in ZEW’s Research Department “Labour Markets” since 2019. Her research focuses on issues surrounding migration as exemplified by the recent influx of refugees into Europe and Germany. The main focus is on feedback effects from immigration with respect to employment and wages on different groups on the German labour market, natives, refugees, and former migrants. In addition, she investigates further economic and societal consequences of recent immigration.

She received her Ph.D. from Freiburg University in 2013. Her thesis focused on empirical analyses of different aspects of the German wage structure such as collective wage bargaining, performance pay and gender differentials. Prior to this, she studied economics at the universities in Bamberg, Alcalá (Madrid) and Frankfurt (Main) with a focus on applied microeconometrics.

Katrin joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in May 2016 and became an IZA Research Fellow in November 2021.