Sholeh Maani is a Professor of Economics, at the Department of Economics, the University of Auckland. She specializes in applied micro-economics with special interest in the economics of labor markets, education, migration, and earnings. Her published work includes studies on wage determination, returns to education, academic performance, higher education policy, participation in higher education, income distribution, unemployment, ethnicity and gender earnings effects, inter-generational economic effects, migration, and ethnic network effects. She has held visiting professor positions at the University of Queensland, University of Wisconsin, Oxford University, and as visiting scholar at the economics department, Harvard University, and the NBER.

With a PhD from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), she joined the University of Auckland in 1985. She has served as the president of the New Zealand Association of Economists, following two years as vice-president. Her teaching of economics covers both post-graduate and undergraduate levels. She has served on several projects as government or international research advisor on labor market/higher education research and policy in New Zealand and overseas, including the OECD. She is an elected board member of the Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics (AASLE, 2019-2021, and 2022-2024), She is a co- editor of the Australian Journal of Labour Economics.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in December 2014.