Hendrik Schmitz is head of the department  "Health Economics" at RWI and Professor of Statistics and Quantitative Methods of Empirical Economic Research at Paderborn University. He studied economics at the Freie Universität of Berlin and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. In 2006 he became a scholarship holder of the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics and completed his doctorate at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2011. From 2010 to2012 he was a research assistant in the department "Health" at RWI and from 2011 to2014 assistant professor of health economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

His research interests lie in empirical health economics, in particular in the identification of causal effects of policy measures. Applications are the investigation of the effects of long-term care, education and major life events (e.g. unemployment) on health and cognitive abilities.