Philipp Kircher is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University where he directs the Institute for Labor Dynamics. He received his PhD from the University of Bonn in 2006, and previously held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford, the London School of Economics, the University of Edinburgh, the European University Institute and the University of Louvain. He is a fellow of the Econometrics Society and the European Economic Association, and has been managing editor and chairman of the Review of Economic Studies.

His research focuses mainly on the consequences of search frictions and the direction of job search in labor markets: how do workers target different occupations and/or wage levels? How can one provide information in job search platforms to help job search? What are the driving forces of sorting in the labor market, and how does it affect wage inequality? He uses tools from various disciplines to investigate these topics. He has also worked on epidemics and how individuals change their behavior in response to diseases and policies, applied both to HIV and Covid-19.

His papers have been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, among others. His work has been supported over the years through support by the ERC, the ESRC and the NSF.