[7] A native of Sendenhorst (North Rhine-Westphalia), Ludger Wößmann earned a MA from the University of Marburg in 1998, a PhD (Dr. sc.

Additionally, he also studied at the University of Kent at Canterbury (1995–96) and at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) (1998–99), where he worked as a researcher before and after his PhD (1999–2003).

In parallel to his academic career in Germany, Wößmann has also held visiting appointments at the Hoover Institution (2007, 2014–15), at Harvard University (2007) and at Aarhus Business School in Denmark (2006).

[25] Relatedly, Wößmann and Hanushek find that using educational attainment instead of school attainment as a measure of human capital enabled lower growth in Latin American countries' human capital in the second half of the 20th century to largely solve the "Latin American growth puzzle" by explaining up to two-thirds of income differences between that region and the rest of the world.

[26] The initial conclusion of Wößmann and Hanushek's research of a strong positive relationship between countries' growth in cognitive skills and economic output has been robust to more sophisticated measures of cross-country educational achievement.

[27] More recently, Wößmann's research has also investigated the international returns to skills as well as the labour market outcomes of different types of education.

Criticizing again the use of school attainment as a measure of human capital as well as previous studies' focus on early career earnings, Wößmann and Hanushek (with Guido Schwerdt and Simon Wiederhold) find the lifetime returns to skills based on PIAAC data on adult skills to be about a quarter higher than earlier estimates.

Analysing the impact of structural change in a dual economy on growth, Wößmann and Jonathan Temple argue that changes in the structure of employment will increase productivity more the higher the inequality between both sectors' marginal products of labour, suggesting that differences in labour reallocation may account for a substantial part of cross-country differences in economic growth.

[31] Regarding long-term economic development, Wößmann has been investigating the roles of education, religion and culture in work with fellow economist Sascha Becker.