General Information

The Center for Doctoral Studies in Economics (CDSE) administers the Ph.D. program at the Department of Economics. It is run by its Academic Director Professor Klaus Adam and administratively managed by Dr. Helga Gebauer.

The CDSE is supported by the ‘Excellence Initiative’ of the German federal and state governments and by private donors, including the Fontana Foundation. The doctoral program is taught and administered in English. Admission is purely based on merit and open to excellent students holding either a Bachelor or Master degree. Admitted students receive a scholarship and there is no tuition fee.

Recent graduates of the program have published in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review and the Journal of the European Economic Association, and have obtained academic positions at top European departments (e.g., Toulouse University, Tilburg University, IIES at Stockholm University), in the U.S. (University of Wisconsin, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City) and Asia (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). Detailed placement information is available here.

The CDSE is located near the Department of Economics in the heart of the city of Mannheim and next to Mannheim’s historic castle. The CDSE offers students first-class IT-systems and software. The university library has over 1.5 million books and approximately 5’000 journals. In the field of economics and business administration the library is one of the best-equipped in Germany.

The Department of Economics

Twenty-two full-time senior faculty members and numerous junior faculty members are engaged in a variety of research projects at the frontiers of their fields, covering micro- and macroeconomics, econometrics, statistical methods, labor economics, industrial organization, financial economics, public economics, economic history and international trade.

Research at the department is supported by large institutional grants from the German National Science Foundation (DFG) and from European Union research and training grants; additional funds are obtained from other public and private institutions.

The Department of Economics has established an exceptionally large number of international contacts, and maintains numerous institutional contacts to universities and research institutions throughout the world. In addition, important research centers are located at Mannheim and are associated with the Department, including

• The Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), which is one of the leading institutes in the field of applied economic research in Europe. It focuses on internationally comparative issues in the European context and maintains a number of important databases.
• The collaborative research center on ‘Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems’ (SFB/TR 15), which is supported from the German National Science Foundation.
  
• The interdisciplinary collaborative research center on ‘The Political Economy of Reforms’ (SFB 884) provides scientific insights into the success and failure of policy reforms, by analyzing competing interests, contexts and the political process of reform-making.