Christina Gathmann is a labor economist with research interests in human capital, the interaction of skills and technology, migration, the spatial distribution of economic shocks and public policies, health and political economy. 

She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Nobel Prize winners James J. Heckman and Gary S. Becker who revolutionized research on policy evaluation methods and human capital. Her dissertation won her the Young Economist Award of the European Economic Association in 2003. 

After securing her Ph.D., Christina Gathmann worked at Stanford University for five years and at the University of Mannheim for two years. In 2006-2007, she held a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution. She became full professor in the Department of Economics (Alfred-Weber-Institut) at Heidelberg University in 2011. Since September 2020, she is the Head of the Labour Market Department at LISER. 

Christina Gathmann made substantial contributions on the role of human capital over the life-cycle -- starting from early childhood, to education and skill depreciation in the labor market. Her work on task human capital has reshaped the distinction between general and specific skills in the labor market (Gathmann & Schönberg 2010). The second research area focuses on the effectiveness and impact of government policies and political institutions on people’s choices and socio-economic outcomes. Her work on citizenship rights, for instance, has shown that citizenship speeds up the economic and social integration of immigrants (Gathmann & Keller 2018; Gathmann et al. 2019c). Her research relies on advanced micro-econometric methods to identify causal effects and provide sound and novel answers to important policy-relevant questions.