Ludger Wößmann

Regarding long-term economic development, Wößmann has been investigating the roles of education, religion and culture in work with fellow economist Sascha Becker. Challenging Max Weber's theory of Protestants' work ethic as the main cause for their higher prosperity, they instead argue that Protestant economies prospered because Protestant society emphasized laypeople's Bible lecture, which in turn increased human capital and, by extension, economic prosperity, and find Prussian Protestants' higher literacy in the 19th century to account for most of the difference in economic prosperity to Catholics. In another use of historical Prussian census data, Wößmann, Becker and Francesco Cinnirella present evidence for the existence of a trade-off between child quantity and child education prior to the beginning of Germany's demographic transition, with an endogenous relationship between fertility and education. Finally, in a study of the long-term impact of the Habsburg Empire's civil service on public attitudes, Wößmann, Becker, Katrin Boeckh and Christa Hainz find a positive "Habsburg effect" on current trust and bureaucratic integrity for individuals living in border communities that were narrowly within the Habsburg Empire relative to those that were narrowly without.

Wößmann's research has focused on educational achievement and long-term economic growth and development. According to IDEAS/RePEc, Wößmann belongs to the 1% of most cited economists, with a leading position in rankings of education economists. Together with Eric A. Hanushek and Stephen Machin, Wößmann has been a co-editor of the Handbook of the Economics of Education, the main academic reference in the field of economics of education, since 2011.

A native of Sendenhorst (North Rhine-Westphalia), Ludger Wößmann earned a MA from the University of Marburg in 1998, a PhD (Dr. sc. pol.) from Kiel University in 2001 under Horst Siebert, and obtained his habilitation from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 under Robert K. von Weizsäcker and Hans-Werner Sinn, with all degrees being in economics. Additionally, he also studied at the University of Kent at Canterbury (1995–96) and at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) (1998–99), where he worked as a researcher before and after his PhD (1999–2003). In 2003, Wößmann became Senior Researcher at the ifo Institute, where he took over the leadership of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education one year later. Following his habilitation in 2006, he has worked as a professor of economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In parallel to his academic career in Germany, Wößmann has also held visiting appointments at the Hoover Institution (2007, 2014–15), at Harvard University (2007) and at Aarhus Business School in Denmark (2006).

Ludger Wößmann (German: [ˈluːtɡɛʁ ˈvœsman]; born in Sendenhorst on July 1, 1973) is a German economist and professor of economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). Moreover, being one of the world's foremost education economists, he is the director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. Beyond the economics of education, his research interests also include economic growth and economic history. In 2014, Wößmann's empirical research on the effects of education and his corresponding contribution to public debate were awarded the Gossen Prize (the German equivalent of the John Bates Clark Medal), followed by the Gustav Stolper Prize in 2017.