"From PhD Student to Policy Leader: A Journey across Research, Universities, and Policymaking"

Prof. Bernd Fitzenberger, PhD Director of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB)

Prof. Bernd Fitzenberger, PhD, is the Director of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg since 2019 and holds the Chair of Quantitative Labor Economics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. The IAB is the research institute of the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) and Germany’s leading center for labor market research. It provides rigorous evidence to inform public policy, particularly in areas such as employment, training, migration, and social protection.

Prof. Fitzenberger studied economics, mathematics, and statistics at the University of Konstanz and Stanford University, receiving his PhD in Economics from Stanford in 1993. After completing his habilitation at Konstanz in 1998, he held professorships in social policy, econometrics, labor economics, and statistics/econometrics at universities in Dresden, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Berlin. His research focuses on wage and income inequality, evaluation of labor market policies, vocational training and transitions from school to work, union effects, and methodological advances in econometrics (notably quantile regression and control function approaches).

As Director of IAB, he bridges academia and policy by overseeing a large team of researchers, guiding the institute’s strategy, and ensuring that evidence-based research informs labor market policy in Germany and beyond.