Martin Hellwig was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and Professor of Economics, University of Bonn (Courtesy Appointment) in 2004.
He holds a diploma in economics from the University of Heidelberg (1970) and a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973).
His academic career involved a postdoctoral year at Stanford University, three years (1974-77) as Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University, ten years as Associate Professor (1977-79) and Professor of Economics (1979-87) at the University of Bonn in Germany, nine years (1987-1996) at the University of Basle, Switzerland, and another eight years at the University of Mannheim (1996-2004).
He has also held visiting positions at the Université Catholique de Louvain, the London School of Economics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and Harvard University.
Prof. Hellwig was the first Chair and is currently Vice Chair of the Advisory Scientifc Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board, one of the institutions the European Union created after the financial crisis. He is also a Member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy of the European Commission, DG Comp, and of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. In the past, he has been a member and Chairman of the German Monopolies Commission and, more recently, of two ad hoc advisory committees in Germany, dealing with government loans and loan guarantees to nonfinancial companies and with exit strategies for the government’s participations in banks in the financial crisis.
He is also a former President of the European Economic Association and of the Verein für Socialpolitik (German Economic Association), an Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a former Co-Editor of Econometrica. His research interests involve financial markets and institutions, corporate governance, public economics, network industries and competition policy, foundations of monetary theory and macroeconomics and anything else that looks intriguing.