Hans-Joachim Voth

Hans-Joachim Voth (born March 31, 1968) is a German economic historian who has served as the UBS Foundation Professor of Economics at the University of Zürich since 2016. He has also served as the Scientific Director of the UBS Center for Economics in Society since 2017. He then spent a year as a visiting student at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he received an MSc in 1993. After spending a year as a doctoral student at the European University Institute in Florence, he graduated with a DPhil from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1996. His research has been published in the AER, QJE, JPE, RESTUD, The Journal of Finance, PNAS, JEEA, AER:Insights, EJ, RESTAT, AEJ:Applied, and all leading economic history journals. His most recent research is on state capacity, long-run growth, the persistence of culture, sovereign debt in historical perspective, the link between economic crisis and political violence and the Great Depression and the German Interwar Economy. Voth has also written about time use in industrializing societies.

Distinctions and honors Voth has won several prizes. In addition to two prizes for best dissertation and election to the Econometric Society in 2022, he won a Leverhulme Prize Fellowship, the Larry Neal Prize for best paper in Explorations in Economic History in 2010-11 (with Mauricio Drelichman), the Albert Hirschman Award for best writing in global political economy, and the Montias Prize for best paper in the Journal of Comparative Economics in 2020-21 (with Jacopo Ponticelli). His research has attracted external funding of more than €4.3 million, including a European Research Council Advanced Grant. He has delivered the Tawney Memorial Lecture at the EHS, Cambridge, April 2011, the Sir John Hicks Lecture in Oxford, 2016, and the NFR Crafts Lecture in Warwick (2021), as well as keynotes at numerous conferences and workshops. His research has - as of November 2025 - been cited more than 11,000 times, and he has an h-index of 49.