Kai A. Konrad is Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance since January 2011. He received his Ph.D. from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in 1990 and habilitated there three years later. He was Professor of Economics at the Free University Berlin from 1994 to 2009 and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway, from 1994 to 2000. Additionally, he was the director of the unit “Market Processes and Governance” at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung between 2001 and 2009. Since 1999, he is a member of the Council of Scientific Advisors to the Ministry of Finance and was elected its chairman in 2011. He is a Co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. His research findings in the fields of political economy, public finance as well as economic policy are published in numerous high-ranking journals like the /American Economic Review/ or /Management Science/.