Hans-Jürgen Andreß, Board Member

Hans-Jürgen Andreß studied Social sciences and research methods at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main (Germany) and Ann Arbor (USA). He gained his Ph.D. at the University of Frankfurt/Main in 1983 and is at present Professor for Empirical Social and Economic Research at the University of Cologne (Germany). He has published in the field of labour markets, poverty research, social policy, and multivariate statistical methods.

Dirk Sliwka, Academic Director

Dirk Sliwka studied from 1991 until 1995 Economics at the University of Bonn and at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Économique in Paris. He did his postdoctoral studies (1995-1999) within the European Doctoral Program in Quantitative Economics in Bonn, Germany with an annual research stay at the London School of Economics. From 1999 until 2000 he was employed by SAP AG as a consultant for Controlling. During his habilitation (2000-2003) at the University in Bonn he was also working as a trainer on the subject of "Strategic Enterprise Management" for SAP AG.

Since 2004 he has been Chair of Personnel Economics and Human Resource Management at the University of Cologne.

He has published in various international academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Management Science, Journal of Labor Economics, and International Journal of Human Resource Management.

Karl Mosler, Board Member

Karl Mosler is Professor of Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Cologne since 1995. Previously, from 1985 to 1995, he was Professor of Statistics and Quantitative Economics at the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg. He received his academic education at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich (Diplom Mathematiker, 1972), and at the Technical University of Munich (Dr. rer. nat., 1975). In 1981 he completed his “Habilitation” in Statistics and Operations Research. He has held temporary and visiting professorships at the universities of Kassel, Hamburg and Frankfurt/Oder as well as at the universities of Pavia and Milan (Bocconi) in Italy. He was awarded the “August Lösch Prize for Regional Science” and the “Erik Kampe Prize in memoriam Tord Palander” of the University of Umea. From 2004 to 2008 he was President of the German Statistical Society and since 2005 he serves as Vice President of the German Consortium in Statistics (DAGStat). He is one of the principal researchers of the Cologne Graduate School.

Mosler’s research interests include statistical and econometric methods, in particular the non-parametric analysis of multivariate data, the modeling of risk, and the measurement of social economic inequality. He is the author of four scientific monographs, three textbooks, and some sixty scholarly articles. Among other journals, he has published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Management Science, the Journal of Economic Inequality, Theory and Decision, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. In addition, he has served as editor and co-editor of several books and journals.

Achim Wambach, Board Member

Achim Wambach did his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at Oxford University. Subsequently, he obtained a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics, before he went to the University of Munich as Assistant Professor.  From 2001 until 2005 he was Professor for Economics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg – since then he has been a professor at the University of Cologne.

His fields of interest lie in the application of game theory and contract theory to the field of market design, with special interest on auction markets, health markets and insurance markets. He has published in leading journals like the Journal of Economic Theory, the International Journal of Industrial Organization, the Journal of Health Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, and the European Economic Review. He is co-editor of the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review and of the journal Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik. For his academic work, he obtained several awards including the „Wissenschaftspreis Gesundheitsökonomie“ of the German Economic Association.

Achim Wambach is a member of the Advisory Board to the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. He was President of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists in 2007-2008. He is co-founder of the economic consultancy TWS Partners, which specializes in auction and negotiation design. Since 2009, he has been Vice Dean for research and young academics at the WiSo faculty.

Achim Wambach is also a co-founder of the premier European auction and procurement strategy specialists, TWS Partners. For TWS, Achim Wambach has developed auction and negotiation strategies, mostly for large European companies in the areas of energy, electronics and automotive industries.

Jens Beckert, Board Member

Jens Beckert studied Sociology and Business Economics in Berlin, New York and Princeton. He graduated with a Dr. phil.  from the Freie Universität Berlin where he also received his habilitation in 2003. From 2002 to 2003 he was Associate Professor of Sociology at the International University in Bremen and from 2003 to 2005 Professor of Sociology at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. In 2005 he became Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and  joined the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of. In 2010 he was appointed Member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Professor Beckert’s research interests focus on the Role of the economy in society, especially based on studies of markets; organizational sociology; sociology of inheritance,  and sociological theory.

André Kaiser, Board Member

André Kaiser received his PhD from the University of Freiburg. He was habilitated at the University of Mannheim in 2000. Following a tenure at the University of Konstanz (2000-2001), he joined the University of Cologne in 2002. He has been a Full Professor of Political Science since 2003 and a member of the Faculty of the International Max Planck Research School “The Social and Political Constitution of the Economy” since 2007. Professor Kaiser’s international experience includes visiting professorships in Poland, Austria, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain.

Professor Kaiser’s research interest is informed by the actor-centred institutionalist approach to the study of politics. Current research projects include party strategies on electoral markets, macro and micro effects of electoral systems and federalism and decentralization effects in OECD countries among others.