Hans-Werner Sinn, born in 1948, studied economics at the Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster. In 1978 he received his doctorate and in 1983 his habilitation at the University of Mannheim. From 1984 to 2016 he was Professor of Economics and Public Finance at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In addition, he held visiting professorships and conducted research at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, the London School of Economics, and at the universities of Bergen, Stanford, Princeton, and Jerusalem. From 1999 to 2016, Hans-Werner Sinn was President of the ifo Institute, Director of the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at LMU, and Managing Director of CESifo GmbH, an initiative of LMU and the ifo Institute.