Sonja Spitzer is a researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. She is also affiliated with the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, the Paris School of Economics, and has worked as a consultant for the the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.

Her research aims to understand the causes behind health and earnings disparities across gender and socioeconomic groups. Using demographic and microeconomic perspectives, she investigates how human capital, life events, and labour market outcomes interact across the life course and shape inequalities in survival. She is also working on improved methods to measure health and ageing across populations.

Dr. Spitzer is Principal Investigator of the project “Skill loss during parental leave and its role for gender disparities in earnings” and leads the Austrian team of “Life is about timing: Health shocks and socioeconomic inequality across the life cycle” – both projects are among the first to use linked Austrian register data. She is also project leader of the European Parenting Leave Policies Dataset. She serves as an editor for the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research and is a health expert advisor for the Austrian Socio-Economic Panel Survey.

Personal Website

University Lectures

European Parenting Leave Policies Dataset (EPLP)