Irene Bertschek
Irene Bertschek is a German economist and head of the Research Department Digital Economy at the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim. She holds a professorship of economics of digitalisation at University of Giessen and is a member of the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (EFI), advising the Federal German government. Biography and career. Bertschek studied economics with a focus on industrial economics and econometrics at University of Mannheim (Diploma, 1992) and at Université catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (M.A., 1991). Within the European Doctoral Program in Quantitative Economics, she  held positions at the Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique (CREST-INSEE) in Paris, at the Humboldt University Berlin and at the Institut de Statistique Université catholique de Louvain. In 1996, she completed her doctoral thesis on „Semiparametric Analysis of Innovative Behaviour“ at Université catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Since 1999, Irene Bertschek is working at ZEW Mannheim. Since 2001, she is head of ZEW’s Research Department Digital Economy. From 2011 to 2017 she held a professorship of applied economic research at University of Mannheim. In 2017, she became professor of economics of digitalisation at  Justus-Liebig-University Gießen. In May 2019, she was appointed as a member of the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (EFI). Research. In her research, Bertschek investigates industrial economic aspects of digitalization with a special focus on the impact of digitalisation on firms’ innovation, productivity and work organization. Her methodological expertise lies in the field of microeconometrics and the analysis of firm-level data.