Ludger Woessmann is Director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education and Professor of Economics at the University of Munich. He is also Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Being interested in the determinants of long-term prosperity of mankind, his main research focus is in the economics of education, especially the importance of education for economic prosperity and the effects of school systems on educational achievement and equality of opportunity. He is Fellow of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academic Advisory Council of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, and the International Academy of Education.

He is co-editor of the Handbook of the Economics of Education and co-organizer of the annual CESifo Area Conference on the Economics of Education. His work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Science, and many others. Google Scholar lists over 35,000 citations to his research (h-index 75).

He joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in September 2001 and became a Research Fellow in December 2003.