Christina Gathmann joined LISER as Head of Labour Market Department in 2020.

Christina Gathmann obtained her PhD at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Nobel Prize winners James J. Heckman and Gary S. Becker who revolutionized research on policy evaluation methods and human capital. Her dissertation won her the Young Economist Award of the European Economic Association in 2003. After her PhD, she spent five years at Stanford University and two years at the University of Mannheim. She has been a full professor at the University of Heidelberg since 2011. Christina is an internationally highly regarded labor economist whose work is published regularly in the top economic journals such as the Journal of European Economic Association, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Economic Journal or Journal of Labor Economics. She made substantial contributions on the role of human capital in the labor market, migration and integration as well as policy evaluation spanning immigration, education, family and health policies. Her expertise on education policies, sources of wage inequality, economic/social assimilation of immigrants will prove invaluable for the analysis of the labor market consequences of the digital transformation.

The research program of Christina Gathmann centers around two broad questions. The first one is on the development of human capital over the life cycle -- starting from early childhood, to education and skill depreciation in the labor market. Her work on task human capital has reshaped the distinction between general and specific skills (Gathmann & Schönberg 2010). The second research area focuses on the effectiveness and impact of government policies or institutional rules on people’s choices and broader economic outcomes. Her work on citizenship rights, for instance, has shown that citizenship speeds up the economic and social integration of immigrants (Gathmann & Keller 2018; Gathmann et al. 2019c). Her research relies on advanced micro-econometric methods to identify causal effects and provide sound and novel answers to important policy-relevant questions.