Between 1982 and 1987 Bart Cockx studied economics at the Catholic University of Leuven (undergraduate degree) and at the London School of Economics (MSc). He obtained his PhD in Leuven in 1992. Between 1993 and 2008, he was professor at the Department of Economics of the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve). Currently, he's professor at SHERPPA, Ghent University. His major research interest is the evaluation of labour market policies. He has published in journals such as the Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) and the Journal of Public Economics.
He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in June 2001.