Katja Maria Kaufmann is Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Bayreuth. Prior to this appointment, she was Professor at the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Assistant Professor at Mannheim University and Assistant Professor at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy) and she held visiting positions at CESifo, the Harvard Kennedy School, IZA, NBER, Princeton University, Stanford University and Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University (USA).

Her research interests are in the areas of Empirical Macroeconomics, Family Economics and Demography, Economics of Education, Labour and Development Economics, Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility, and Peer Effects/Social Interactions.

Katja Kaufmann joined IZA as a Research Fellow in March 2016. She is also Research Fellow at briq, at the CESifo Research Network and at the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik (Bildungsoekonomischer und Entwicklungsoekonomischer Ausschuss) and Member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. In 2010 she was awarded the CESifo Distinguished Affiliate Award for the Economics of Education and in 2014, she acquired a large grant from the Elite foundation of Badem-Wuerttemberg. Since 2018 she is Principal Investigator at the CRC Collaborative Research Center TRR 224.

Her work has been published in several leading journals, including the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and Quantitative Economics.