Eric A. Hanushek

Eric A. Hanushek is a frequent visitor to CESifo. Since 2006, he has been a research professor at ifo, and he has visited Munich two or three times each year for the past decade. His research has been closely aligned with the ifo Center for the Economics of Education, where he has worked closely with Ludger Woessmann and various members of the department.

He serves as area director of the Economics of Education field in the CESifo network. Along with Ludger Woessmann he has coordinated the annual CESifo Conference on the Economics of Education since 2008. 

His current research as a CESifo visitor is focused on comparing the educational outcomes of different countries and on understanding the implications of the varying educational performance for economic well-being. This work fits into the International Comparative Education Policy Lab, a research organization in the ifo Institute that he co-founded.

His primary appointment is as the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is a recognized leader in the economic analysis of education issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. He is the author of numerous widely-cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. He was the first to research teacher effectiveness by measuring students’ learning gains, which formed the conceptual basis for using value-added measures to evaluate teachers and schools, now a widely adopted practice. His recent book with Ludger Woessmann, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth, summarizes his research establishing the close links between countries’ long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations.   He has authored or edited twenty-four books along with over 250 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.