Kai A. Konrad, born in 1961, got his university degrees at the University of Heidelberg (Diplom-Volkswirt; eq. M.A. in Economics, 1985) and the University of Munich (Dr.oec.publ.; eq. Ph.D. in Economics, 1990, and Dr.rer.pol.habil., 1993). He had research and teaching positions at the Universities of Munich, Bonn, Bergen (Norway) and the University of California at Irvine. He held a chaired Professorship of Economics at the Free University of Berlin from 1994 to 2009 and was a Director at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) from 2001 to 2009. Since 2009 he is Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and from 2009 to 2010 he was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law. Since 2011 he is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.

From 7/2007 to 12/2018 he was a Co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. He was a Managing Editor of Economic Policy, is a Senior Editor of Economic Policy, and a co-founding Editor of Economics of Governance. He is on the editorial boards of several other international journals in Economics and Political Science. He served as an advisor to governments, he is a member of the Council of Scientific Advisors to the German Ministry of Finance and chaired this Council from 2011-2014.

His main fields of current and future research interests are in public economics, microeconomic theory and political economy. He published more than 130 papers in Economics, Political Sciences, Law, Operations Research, and Management in international journals in such as the Economic Journal, American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Reliability Engineering & System Safety , Rand Journal of Economics and Management Science.

Kai Konrad joined IZA as Research Fellow in August 1999.