Front page

Welcome!

Michael Oberfichtner has been professor for employment research at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg and head of the research department “Establishments and Employment” at IAB since April 2023.

His current research focuses on imperfect competition in labour markets, on understanding gender differences in employment outcomes, and on field experiments to evaluate labour market policies.

Michael Oberfichtner is research fellow of IZA, associate of the interdisciplinary research network LASER and member of the Standing Field Committees for Social Policy and for Population Economics of the Verein für Socialpolitik.

News and announcements:

• In the winter term 2025/2026, I will a seminar on labour and education economics jointly with Prof. Markus Nagler. This term, we will focus on the reproducibility of empirical studies and each student will reproduce and extend one recently published paper. For details, see https://sites.google.com/view/oberfichtner/teaching [external link]
• In the summer term 2025, I will teach a course on Bildungsökonomik (in German). For more information, see the “Teaching” page.
• The paper “Parental Leave, Worker Substitutability, and Firms’ Employment” by Mathias Huebener, Jonas Jessen, Daniel Kühnle and myself is forthcoming at the Economic Journal and available here https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueae114 [external link]