Axel Börsch-Supan


Axel Börsch-Supan is a German researcher, economist and director of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich, Germany. He is Professor of Economics and Chair for the Economics of Aging at the Technical University of Munich.
Additionally, he is Managing Director of SHARE-ERIC. An important field of his empirical research focuses on socio-political issues that are associated with economic aspects of demographic change and the aging of the population.

Education and career

Axel Börsch-Supan studied mathematics and economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Bonn, from which he graduated in 1980, receiving his diploma for his thesis titled Stability and step size control for the solution of parabolic partial differential equations with finite difference methods. In June 1984, he received a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The topic of his dissertation was Housing Demand in the United States and West Germany: A Discrete Choice Analysis under the supervision of Daniel McFadden.
He was an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University in 1984-1987, professor of economic theory at the Technical University of Dortmund in 1987-1989, and professor of macroeconomics and public policy at the University of Mannheim in 1989-2011. He founded the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging.
He is director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich and heads the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging since 2011. Additionally, he is Managing Director of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe.
Börsch-Supan is member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1998 as well as member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2000. Since 2015, he is also a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Other activities

Börsch-Supan is member of the Council of Advisors to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, was a member of the German federal governments’ Commissions on Pension Reform and the Expert Group on Demographic Change, the advisory group on demographic change of President Horst Köhler, and the European Statistics Advisory Committee. As public policy adviser, he has consulted to several ministries of the German federal and state governments, the European Commission, the World Bank, the OECD and several foreign governments.

Selected publications