Florian Hoffmann

Florian Hoffmann is an Associate Professor and BIE Director at the Vancouver School of Economics within the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2010 and has established himself as a leading researcher in labor economics. His professional affiliations include membership in the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group within the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago since 2012, Research Fellow at the Halle Institute for Economic Research, Director of the IAB Research Data Center, and Board Member of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF).

• Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2010

Hoffmann's research focuses on the determinants of life-cycle earnings and career dynamics, dynamic discrete choice models of human capital formation, estimation of equilibrium search models, and the importance of student-instructor interactions for academic achievement. His work bridges theoretical econometrics with empirical applications in labor markets. His research has identified significant effects of demographic matching between instructors and students, showing that the performance gap between white and underrepresented minority students falls by roughly half when taught by an underrepresented minority instructor.

Hoffmann's publications appear in top economics journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and Journal of Human Resources. His recent work has examined growing income inequality across advanced economies, complex-task biased technological change effects on labor markets, and Burdett-Mortensen models of on-the-job search.

• Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies (2020)
• Complex-Task Biased Technological Change and the Labor Market (2017)
• Burdett-Mortensen Model of On-the-Job Search with Two Sectors (2016)

As an educator, Hoffmann teaches several courses at UBC including ECON 326 (Methods of Empirical Research), ECON 360 (3rd Year Labour Economics), and ECON 460 (4th Year Labour Economics). He has also been invited to teach labor economics courses at the Bavarian Graduate Program in Economics and the University of Halle-Wittenberg. His research methodology combines sophisticated econometric techniques with large administrative datasets to address fundamental questions about labor market dynamics.