Mark Gradstein studied in Tel Aviv (BA) and Bar Ilan (MA, PhD) universities. He has been on the faculty of Ben Gurion University since 1989 and is a fellow of CEPR and CESifo. He has also taught as a visitor at the universities of Toronto, Pennsylvania, and Virginia and was a visiting scholar in the Research Department of the World Bank. He has done research in public economics and the political economy of education and development, publishing in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Public Economics, among others. A book on the political economy of education, co-authored with Moshe Justman and Volker Meier, is due to come out at the end of 2004.

Mark Gradstein joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 2004.