Christoph M. Schmidt

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Dennis J. Snower (IfW, left) and Christoph M. Schmidt (RWI, right)

Christoph M. Schmidt (born August 25, 1962 in Canberra , Australia ) is a German economist .

Schmidt is President of the RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research and until February 2020 was Chairman of the Advisory Council for the Assessment of Overall Economic Development ("Council of the Five Economic Ways"). He is also Professor of Economic Policy and Applied Econometrics at the Ruhr University in Bochum .

His main research interests are in the field of applied econometrics , in particular labor and population economics as well as energy policy issues. He advocates a CO 2 tax to combat human-made global warming .

Life

Christoph Schmidt passed his Abitur in 1981 at the Domgymnasium Fulda . He then studied economics at the University of Mannheim , where he graduated in 1987 with a degree in economics. He then moved to Princeton University , where he obtained a master’s degree in 1989 and received his doctorate in 1991 with an empirical thesis on the German labor market . His doctoral supervisor was David Card , another supervisor of his doctoral thesis was Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton . Schmidt completed his habilitation in 1995 at the University of Munich . During his training, he was a Princeton University Fellowship (1987-1990), the Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (1990-1991) as well as a post-doctoral fellowship of the German Research Foundation Award (1992-1995). In 2016 he was awarded the Gustav-Stolper-Preis of the Verein für Socialpolitik for his achievement "to put important economic-political issues in the focus of the discussion and to convey them to a broad public".

He has been a Research Affiliate since 1992 and has been a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London since 1996 . Since 1998 he has been a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future of Work (IZA) in Bonn. In 1995 he was appointed to the Chair of Econometrics at the University of Heidelberg , which he held until 2002. Since 2002 he has been a professor at the Ruhr University Bochum and President of the RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Essen. In March 2009 Schmidt was appointed to the Expert Council to assess macroeconomic developments , where he took the place of Bert Rürup . In March 2013 he took over the chairmanship of the Expert Council from Wolfgang Franz until the end of his membership in February 2020. From 2011 to 2013 he was an expert member of the Enquete Commission on Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life of the German Bundestag. Since 2014 he has been a member of the executive committee of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) , of which he has been a member since 2011. Since 2017 he has been deputy chairman of the board of directors of the academy project "Energy Systems of the Future" funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), in which he has been involved since 2013.

In April 2020 Schmidt was unanimously elected co-chair of the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts. Schmidt has been a member of the body since it was set up by the Treaty of Aachen in October 2019. Schmidt has also been a member of the "Corona Expert Council" of the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia since April 2020. The twelve-person committee set up by Prime Minister Armin Laschet is to develop "criteria and standards for opening up social and public life" in the context of the Corona crisis .

Schmidt was co-editor of the Journal of Population Economics and the German Economic Review . He has published in numerous renowned journals such as the European Economic Review , the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization , the Journal of Health Economics , the Journal of Public Economics , and the Review of Economics and Statistics .

He is also co-author of the textbook “Empirical Economic Research. An introduction".

Schmidt is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature (2015), the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2018), and the Board of Trustees of Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation , the Essen Children's Foundation, on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation , as well as on the Scientific Advisory Board of the economic policy journal Wirtschaftsdienst .

Positions

Christoph Schmidt stands for evidence-based policy advice, whose recommendations for action are based on the findings of empirical economic research and at the same time transparently disclose the underlying theoretical assumptions.

In connection with Thilo Sarrazin's book Germany Abolishes Itself , he sharply criticized its methodology and accused him of misunderstood statistics and racism. Sarrazin is crazy about the methodological limits of statistical procedures and thus arrives at absurd conclusions with which he tries to support pseudoscientific racist theses.

In March 2013, Schmidt called for economic policy reforms in Germany, which he sees as a further development of the " Hartz reforms " from 2003 to 2005. This includes further liberalization of the labor market and a further increase in the retirement age to 69 years in 2060.

Schmidt describes a minimum wage of 8.50 euros as a “very high hurdle” for the goal of integrating refugees and low-skilled workers into the labor market. He spoke out against an increase because it would endanger jobs, especially for the low-skilled. So far the minimum wage has not yet led to any clearly recognizable job losses, but a reliable balance sheet will only be possible in a few years.

Christoph Schmidt advocates a sustainable and cost-effective energy transition as part of a European solution. He advocates the switch to green energy generation, but criticizes the individual funding of technologies within the framework of the national renewable energy law as inefficient and socially unjust. The main arguments of the criticism are that due to the participation of German companies in EU emissions trading through simultaneous national solo efforts like the EEG not a single additional ton of CO2 can be saved and that especially low-income households are particularly burdened by the EEG surcharge . Together with the environmental economist Ottmar Edenhofer , Schmidt developed a tax concept based on a CO 2 tax that aims to combat climate change through purely market-based mechanisms.

Due to the social imbalance in the education system, Christoph Schmidt advocates the introduction of socially acceptable downstream tuition fees. Together with scientists from the Australian National University, he developed the “BAföG Plus” model, according to which all students received an interest-free state loan to pay fees. This would be paid back as a kind of graduate tax at the end of your studies, depending on your income. The BAföG grant granted on the basis of a means test would be retained.

Honors

Web links

Selected publications

  • TK Bauer, P. Breidenbach, CM Schmidt: "Phantom of the Opera" or "Sex and the City" - Historical Amenities as Sources of Exogenous Variation . In: Labor Economics , vol. 37 (2015), pp. 93–98. DOI: 10.1016 / j.labeco.2015.05.005
  • TK Bauer, S. Bender, A. Paloyo, CM Schmidt: Do Guns Displace Books? The Impact of Compulsory Military Service on Educational Attainment . In: Economics Letters , Vol. 124 (2014), pp. 513-515. DOI: 10.1016 / j.econlet.2014.07.026
  • M. Frondel, CM Schmidt: A Measure of a Nation's Physical Energy Supply Risk . In: The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance , Vol. 54 (2014), Issue 2, pp. 208–215.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Home. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Dohmen et al .: New tax concept: How the market should now save the climate . Spiegel +, November 30, 2018.
  3. ^ Reunion after many years - patronage festival at the Rabanus-Maurus-Schule , Fuldaer Zeitung, February 8th, 2014.
  4. ^ Press archive. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  5. ↑ a b c Christoph M. Schmidt at RWI Essen
  6. ↑ List of award winners | Association for social politics. In: www.socialpolitik.de. Retrieved December 29, 2016 .
  7. ^ Former council members. March 2, 2020, accessed March 2, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Energy systems of the future. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Press releases. Retrieved April 2, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Prime Minister Armin Laschet appoints "Expert Council Corona" | The state portal Wir in NRW. April 1, 2020, accessed April 2, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Thomas K. Bauer, Michael ready, Christoph M. Schmidt: Empirical economic research: An introduction (=  Springer textbook ). Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-540-00041-9 ( springer.com [accessed December 19, 2018]).
  12. ↑ Member entry by Christoph M. Schmidt at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz , accessed on November 6, 2017
  13. ↑ Kinderstiftung Essen eV: Kinderstiftung Essen: Kuratorium. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Scientific Advisory Board | Economic service. Retrieved January 4, 2018 .
  15. ↑ RWI position. In: www.rwi-essen.de. RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, accessed on December 19, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Misunderstood Statistics and Racism ( Memento from September 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), Handelsblatt, September 6, 2010
  17. ↑ Experts for the continuation of Schröder's agenda policy. On: www.welt.de, March 10, 2013.
  18. ↑ RP ONLINE: Lower wage limit: minimum wage over EUR 8.80? Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Bert Losse: Wirtschaftsweiser Schmidt: Do not increase the minimum wage in 2017. Retrieved December 19, 2018 .
  20. ↑ WELT: Wirtschaftsweiser: Purely German energy transition makes no sense . In: THE WORLD . December 29, 2013 ( welt.de [accessed December 19, 2018]).
  21. ↑ Dohmen et al. (2018). New tax concept: Spiegel +, November 30, 2018. How the market should now save the climate. http://www.spiegel.de/plus/neues-steuerkonzept-fuer-deutschland-raus-aus-absurdistan-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000161087441
  22. ↑ Key issues paper by Ottmar Edenhofer and Christoph Schmidt. In: www.rwi-essen.de. RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, accessed on December 19, 2018 .
  23. ^ Mathias Sinning, Christoph M. Schmidt, Katja Fels: BAföG Plus: Germany's new university funding. Downstream tuition fees can resolve the social imbalance in education funding . No. 66 . RWI Positions, 2015 ( econstor.eu [accessed December 19, 2018]).
  24. ↑ Gustav Stolper Prize , accessed on September 11, 2017.
  25. ^ Citizens of the Ruhr area , accessed on July 2, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Christoph M.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Canberra , Australia