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Interview with Hans-Werner Sinn

December 9, 2013

Hans-Werner Sinn


President of the Ifo Institute
Professor of Economics and Public Finance
University of Munich (LMU)
 

Biography

Hans-Werner Sinn is Professor of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich (LMU) and President of the Ifo Institute. He is the director of the LMU's Center for Economic Studies (CES) and runs the CESifo Research Network. Sinn has been a member of the Council of Economic Advisors to the German Ministry of Economics since 1989 and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since 1996. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Magdeburg, the University of Helsinki and the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and has held visiting fellowships at the University of Bergen, the London School of Economics, Stanford University, Princeton University, Hebrew University and Oslo University, and he has been a fellow of the NBER since 1989.

He received the top prizes at the university for his doctoral dissertation and post-doctoral theses as well as a number of other prizes and awards from various institutions, including the international Corinne Award for his best-seller on Germany's economic problems. In 2005 he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1999 he gave the Yrjö-Jahnsson Lectures, in 2000 the Stevenson Lectures, in 2004 the Tinbergen Lectures, in 2005 the World Economy Annual Lecture at the University of Nottingham, the Bavarian Order of Merit (2008), Europe Award of the Maastricht University (2008), Gustav Stolper Prize of the German Economic Association (2008), the Agnar Sandmo Lecture at Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (2009), and the D.B Doran Lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2010), among many other distinctions.

From 1997 to 2000 he was president of the German Economic Association, and president of the International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF) from 2006 to 2009. His fields of interest include the economics of transition, risk and insurance, natural resources, monetary trade theory and public finance. In these areas he has published more than 100 scholarly articles, a number of scientific comments, more than 200 policy articles, and numerous interviews and newspaper articles. He has published a dozen monographs with more than 30 editions in six languages. They include titles such as Economic Decisions under Uncertainty, Capital Income Taxation and Resource Allocation, Jumpstart - The Economic Unification of Germany, The New Systems Competition, Can Germany Still Be Saved?, Casino Capitalism, and The Green Paradox.