Michael C. Burda has been professor of economics (C4) in the Department of Economics at the Humboldt University Berlin since August 1993. His research centers on macroeconomics and the economics of labor markets. He received his BA, MA and Ph.D. (1987) at Harvard University, Cambridge/Massachusetts, USA. From 1987-1993 he was assistant professor, then associate professor of economics at the Institut Europeen d'Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) at Fontainebleau, France, and spent 1992-3 as a German Marshall Fund Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. In fall 1996 he was a visiting Professor at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley.

Michael C. Burda is Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the Council of the European Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the "Verein für Socialpolitik". With Charles Wyplosz (Geneva), he is the author of the textbook Macroeconomics: A European Text (Oxford University Press, now in second edition and translated into eight languages) and has published papers on the economic origins and impacts of labor market institutions, economic integration, employment and wages, and globalization, as well as the transformation of Eastern and Central Europe and the former German Democratic Republic. He serves in the scientific councils of the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), the German Socioeconomic Panel, and the Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle (IWH). In 1998 he received the Gossen Prize of the Verein für Socialpolitik.

Michael C. Burda joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 1999. From 2016-2023 he acted as Program Coordinator of the institute's research area "Labor in the Macroeconomy".