Anke Hoeffler

Anke Elisabeth Hoeffler (born 1 November 1967) is a German-British social scientist. She is Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz, where she holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.

Her research addresses the causes and consequences of civil war and interpersonal violence, and their relationship to economic development. With Paul Collier, she developed the "greed and grievance" framework (Greed versus grievance) for the quantitative study of civil war onset; the resulting paper was named a Current Classic in Economics & Business by Thomson Reuters' ScienceWatch.com in February 2010.

In 2024 she was elected a member of the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.

Education Hoeffler studied economics in Würzburg (Diplom, 1991) and at Birkbeck College, University of London (MSc, 1993), before completing a DPhil in economics at Balliol College, University of Oxford (1999).

In 2018, Hoeffler was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, Germany's most highly endowed research prize. In 2019, she joined the University of Konstanz as an Alexander von Humboldt Professor and has since led the Development Research Group. In single-authored work from this period, she examined the augmented Solow growth model's applicability to Africa and the role of trade openness and investment in African growth. This methodological work also fed into the broader literature on African economic growth, reflected in the edited volume The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa, 1960–2000 by Benno J. Ndulu, Stephen A. O'Connell, Robert H. Bates, Paul Collier and Chukwuma C. Soludo.

Hoeffler has published widely across development economics and political economy topics, including on the determinants and effectiveness of foreign aid, the relationship between democracy and economic performance in resource-rich states, the allocation of aid between need, merit, and donor self-interest, and, more recently, the drivers and character of Chinese foreign aid.

A more recent strand of her research, developed with James Fearon, quantifies and compares the global costs of interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence and the physical punishment of children, with those of civil war and terrorism. This research is the subject of Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence (Princeton University Press, 2026), co-authored with Fearon, which estimates that the global cost of interpersonal violence such as homicide and assault is around eight times higher than the cost of war and terrorism combined, and that the cost of non-fatal domestic violence against women and children alone exceeds the combined costs of homicide, assault, terrorism, and war.

Personal life Hoeffler is married and has two sons. Her father, Dietrich Höffler (1934–2020), was a German nephrologist and professor of medicine. Her brother, economist Felix Höffler (1970–2019), was Professor of Economics at the University of Cologne and director of the university's Institute of Energy Economics (EWI) until his death in 2019.

Selected publications