Bernd Fitzenberger has been the director of the IAB since September 2019 (with an interruption in September 2020), and Professor of Quantitative Labor Economics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since October 2020.

He studied economics, mathematics and statistics at the University of Konstanz in Germany and Stanford University in the USA. In 1993, he graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in Economics. In 1998, he completed his postdoctoral habilitation at the University of Konstanz and was appointed Professor of Economics, esp. Social Policy at TU Dresden. From 1999 to 2004 he held the Chair of Econometrics at the University of Mannheim, from 2004 to 2007 he held the Chair of Economics, esp. Labor Economics, at Goethe University Frankfurt and from 2007 to 2015 the Chair of Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Freiburg. From 2015 to 2020, Bernd Fitzenberger was Professor of Econometrics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Bernd Fitzenberger is a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, at CESifo in Munich and at the Research Center for Education and the Labor Market in Maastricht, as well as an international research affiliate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. In addition, he is the co-editor of the international journal Labour Economics, and member of the editorial board of the Journal for Labour Market Research. Furthermore, he is a fellow at LASER (Labor and Socio-economic Research Center). He was the responsible coordinator of the DFG Priority Program ‘The German Labor Market in a Globalized World: Challenges through Trade, Technology and Demographics’ (SPP 1764), which has been running between 2014 and 2022. As a research associate, he cooperates with the RFBerlin on the analysis of the interaction between housing markets and inequality and on analyzing the export success of German firms.

His main research areas are wage inequality, employment trends, evaluation of measures in the field of labor market and education policy, vocational training and the transition from school to the labor market, employment of mothers, trade unions (binding collective agreements, degree of organisation, salary structures and employment), evaluation methods and the method of quantile regression.