Hans-Joachim Voth

UBS Foundation Professor of Economics, University of Zurich

Short Biography

Hans-Joachim VothI hold a UBS Foundation Professorship at the Economics Department, University of Zurich.  My areas of specialization include long-run growth, cultural economics, and economic and financial history. In 2022, I was elected to a Fellowship of the Econometric Society. Until 2021, I served as one of the joint managing editors of the Economic Journal, and as an associate editor at the QJE. In the past, I have also been a managing editor of Explorations in Economic History, and of the European Review of Economic History. I am the Scientific Director of the UBS Center for Economics in Society, Zurich. 

My research has been published in four of the top 5 journals in economics, as well as in books and field journals. Principal areas of research include long-run economic growth, the history of sovereign debt, causes and consequences of the Nazi Party's rise to power, and the economic history of the Industrial Revolution. I have published three academic books with OUP and Princeton UP, five popular books, and over 50 articles. These have appeared (inter alia) in the AER, the QJE, JPE, RESTUD, the Journal of Finance, RESTAT, the EJ, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of Economic Growth, the European Economic Review, and Explorations in Economic History. My research has also been profiled in The Economist, the FT, the New York Times, Financial Times Deutschland, Wall Street Journal, NZZ, Handelsblatt, FAZ, Le Monde, Vanguardia and De Volkskraat.

I was educated in Bonn, Freiburg, EUI (Florence, and Oxford, where I graduated in 1996 from Nuffield College. From 1998 to 2013, I was a professor at UPF, Barcelona. I'm a Research Fellow in the International Macro Program and the Economic History Program at the CEPR (London), have held visiting appointments at the Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, the MIT Economics Department, Princeton, at NYU-Stern and at the Stanford Economics Department, and I have been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, ANU, Canberra, Australia and at Nuffield College, Oxford, as well a research fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. From 1999 to 2003, I served as the Associate Director at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge. After finishing my doctorate in 1996, I also worked as a Senior Associate for McKinsey & Co., Munich. I've advised Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt, and McKinsey & Co., Germany.

In 2008, I was awarded an Advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). In 2001, I became one of the first four economists in Britain to win a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Projects of mine have received major support from the SNF Switzerland, the Spanish Education Ministery, and the Canadian Social Science Research Council. In total, I have directed or co-directed projects that attracted more than €5 million in research funding.

For my work, I have also received the Albert Hirschman Award by Foreign Policy, the Montias Prize of the Journal of Comparative Economics, the Economic History Association's Alexander Gerschenkron Prize, and the Gino Luzzatto Prize from the European Historical Economics Society for the best dissertation in economic history, the Larry Neal Prize for best paper in Explorations in Economic History, and a Ramon y Cajal research distinction from the Spanish Ministry of Education. I'm a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London). I have delivered the Economic History Society's Tawney Lecture in 2011, the Hong Kong Institute of Advanced Study Distinguished Lecture in 2015, and the Sir John Hicks Lecture in Oxford in 2016.

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