Röller top economic advisor

Prof. Lars-Hendrik Röller, Ph.D., to whom the HSG awarded an honorary doctorate in Economics in 2011, is to head the Department of Economic and Finance Policy in the German Federal Chancellery.

5 July 2011. Lars-Hendrik Röller is thus the closest economic policy advisor to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Born in 1958, Röller read economics in Texas and Philadelphia and obtained a Ph.D. from the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania in 1987. After professorships in Bergen, Fontainebleau and Berlin, he was chief economist of the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission from 2003 to 2007. Since 2006, he has been President of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin and at the same time has held the Chair of Industrial Economics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and has been Research professor at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin.

Important contributions to industrial economics
Lars-Hendrik Röller has made important contributions to various fields of industrial economics, par-ticularly to the empirical analysis of markets with incomplete competition, to the role of infrastructure policy for economic development and to the economic foundations of competition policy.

Lars-Hendrik Röller has received a great number of prizes for his academic work, particularly the Gossen Prize of the Verein für Socialpolitik, the most important award for economists under 45 in the German-speaking area. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and has been Chairman of the Verein für Socialpolitik, the association of German-speaking economists, since 2008.

Commuter between academia and practice
With his multiple moves between university and practice, Lars-Hendrik Röller has shown that it is possible in the field of economics, too, to combine scientific research that satisfies the highest interna-tional standards with practical activities in the field of economic policy. This was one of the reasons why he was awarded an honorary doctorate, for as was stated in the eulogy: “This combination of excellent research and strong involvement in economic policy corresponds to the ideal type evoked by our University’s guiding principles.”