Tobias Thomas

Tobias Thomas (born April 30, 1975 in Duisburg) is a German economist and Director General of Statistics Austria.

He is also Vice Chair of the Austrian Productivity Board (PROD), and professor of economics, in particular of Public Finance and Political Economy, at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

From 2017 to June 2020, he was director of the economic research institute EcoAustria, based in Vienna.

According to the 2019 ranking of economists by Die Presse, F.A.Z., and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Thomas is the 5th most influential economist in Austria.

Since 2020, he has no longer been listed in accordance with the ranking’s regulations due to his position as Director General of Statistics Austria.

Thomas is regularly present in national and international media, for example in BusinessDay, Der Standard, Die Presse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Schweizer Monat, Trend and Wirtschaftswoche.

In 2022, Thomas was quoted 1,601 times in Austrian media only (2021: 1,413 times).

Thomas studied economics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn and Technical University Berlin before earning his doctorate summa cum laude at Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, where he later also gained his habilitation.

Thomas was a visiting scholar at, among others, Columbia University at the invitation of Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz and Anya Schiffrin and at the Max-Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in Munich at the invitation of Kai A. Konrad.

Since June 2020, Thomas is Director General of Statistics Austria.

Thomas is Vice Chair of the Austrian Productivity Board (PROD), scientific expert at the Austrian Pension Commission which analyses the financial sustainability of the national pension system, and he serves as member of the Commission Future of Statistics (KomZS) for the strategic planning of the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis).

In addition, Thomas is Vice President of the Austrian Statistical Society (ÖSG), member of the Science Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), member of the Committee on Economic Systems and Institutional Economics of the Verein für Socialpolitik (VfS), and Research Fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) of the Central European University (CEU).

Internationally, Thomas represents Austria in the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC), the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), the United Nations Conference of European Statisticians (UNCES), and the OECD Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy (CSSP).

In 2021, he was also elected by the ESS member states to the Partnership Group (ESS-PG), which provides strategic advice to the work of the ESSC.

In addition, Thomas is member of the UNCES task force on data stewardship.

In his research at the interface between economics and psychology, Thomas analyses decision processes and behaviour in economic and political contexts.

His research interest includes public finance, the economics of political reforms as well as the impact of the media on perception and behaviour.

His research results on the impact of media coverage on the population's concerns about migration were published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO); the analysis of the impact of media coverage on voting intentions as well as his research on the political positioning of the US Newscasts ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX in the European Journal of Political Economy (EJPE); his research on the role of the media in democracies in the Constitutional Political Economy (CPE).

Other research on policymakers' risk-taking in the context of reform has been published in the Review of Economics, on the economic consequences of reform reluctance in Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, on climate policy measures and energy forecasts for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in Zeitschrift für Energiewirtschaft, and on improving economic forecasts in the Journal of Forecasting.

In addition, Thomas focusses in his applied research on the sustainability of public finances and social security systems as well as the competitiveness of economies.

Other areas of focus include data science, data governance of complex data ecosystems, as well as building and improving research data infrastructure facilities.