Bertil Holmlund is Professor of Economics at Uppsala University. He was member of the executive committee of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) in 1996–2002 and served as president of EALE in 2002–2005. He was co-editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics in 1997–2000 and chairman of the Swedish Economic Council in 2001–2005. In 2004 he was elected as member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and has served as chairman of the prize committee for the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008–2010.

Holmlund's research has frequently been on the interface between labour economics, public economics and macroeconomics. He has worked on issues concerning labour mobility, the microeconomics and the macroeconomics of unemployment, wage determination and wage structures, trade union behaviour, labour market policies, the design of unemployment insurance, labour taxation, worker absenteeism and the economics of education. His current research includes studies of job search in a family context, the effect of school choice on educational performance, and the design of optimal unemployment insurance in the presence of part-time unemployment.