Research

Hans-Werner Sinn has been a professor at the Economics Faculty of the University of Munich since 1984. He initially held the Chair for Insurance Economics and later changed to the Chair for Economics and Public Finance. Sinn has led the Center for Economic Studies (CES), which he founded, since 1991. In 1999 he was appointed President of the Ifo Institute, which he led back into the circle of the federal government and Länder’s “mainly research-based institutions” in 2010. In 1999 he founded the CESifo research network, which now has over 1,000 members and is one of the world‘s largest networks in the field of economics. Sinn has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Federal Ministry of Economics since 1989. He is also a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, as well as the Austrian, North Rhine Westphalian and European Academies of Science.

In his doctoral thesis (submitted in 1977 to the University of Mannheim) Sinn developed a formal theory on the influence of limited liability on decision-making under uncertainty and proved that the asymmetric sharing of profits and losses it implies provides an incentive for excessive risk taking. These results were of relevance for the insurance business and financial sector regulation. They explain the “casino capitalism” in the banking sector that triggered a worldwide financial crisis several years ago, and which was analysed by Sinn in his book of the same title published in 2009. Sinn was the first economist to formulate a general intertemporal equilibrium model of a growing economy. He used his model to analyse a wide number of issues from the field of intertemporal taxation effects. In his early years, as well as later in his book entitled “The Green Paradox,” Sinn looked at intertemporal resource problems and developed the basis for a supply-side approach to climate policy. His other main research interests cover questions of demography and social security insurance, as well as competition among economic systems. Most recently he analysed the European debt crisis, and shed light on the ECB’s bail-out policy, which is measured by the so-called Target System.

During research stays and as a guest professor, Hans-Werner Sinn has worked at several international universities including the University of Western Ontario, the London School of Economics, as well as the Universities of Bergen, Princeton, Stanford and Jerusalem. He has received numerous rewards for his research achievements, including honorary doctorates from the Universities of Magdeburg, Helsinki and Leipzig, as well as honorary professorships from the Universities of Düsseldorf and Vienna. Sinn was invited to give a sizeable number of Distinguished Lectures at foreign universities and has received a series of scientific prizes for his work. He was also awarded the Ludwig Ehrhard Prize for economic journalism, the Bavarian Order of Maximilian for Science and Art and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.