Kurt Schmidheiny is Professor of Economics and Applied Econometrics at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London) and at CESifo (Munich), a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Economics and the Journal of Economic Geography. He currently serve as president of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics.

His research focuses on tax competition, fiscal federalism and urban economics. His work is published in the Journal of Political Economy, PNAS, American Economic Journal, Economic Journal, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Journal of Economic Geography.