Associate Professor at the Central European University in Budapest. Visiting Research Fellow, Deputy Program Director "Migration", the leader of the research sub-area EU Enlargement and the Labor Markets and former Deputy Director of Research (2009) at the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. Co-founder and Scientific Director of CELSI, Bratislava. Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University's Labour and Worklife Program.

His main research interests are labour and population economics, ethnicity, migration, and reforms in Central Eastern European labour markets. Martin Kahanec has published in peer-reviewed academic journals, contributed chapters in collected volumes including the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (OxfordUP) and the International Handbook on the Economics of Migration (Edward Elgar), and he has edited several scientific book volumes and journal special issues.

He is the Managing Editor of the IZA Journal of European Labour Studies, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Manpower, and member of the Editorial Board of Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research.

Martin Kahanec has held several advisory positions and leading roles in a number of scientific and policy projects with the World Bank, the European Commission, OECD, and other international and national institutions.

Martin Kahanec earned his Ph.D. in Economics in 2006 from the Centre for Economic Research (CentER), Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He earned his Master's degree from the Central European University in Budapest as well as from the Faculty of management, Comenius University, in Bratislava in 2000, where he also earned his Bachelor's degree in 1998.