Moritz Schularick studied at the University of Paris VII, the London School of Economics, and the Humboldt University Berlin. He received his doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin in 2005, where he became an assistant professor. In 2012, he accepted an appointment at the Department of Economics at the University of Bonn, where he has been teaching and conducting research as a professor of macroeconomics ever since. He directs the MacroFinance Lab, which researches fundamental societal issues related to financial stability, inequality, and globalization. He is also a leading researcher in the ECONtribute cluster of excellence at the University of Bonn. As a visiting scholar, he has held positions at Cambridge University, the Stern School of Business at New York University, and the Institut d'études politiques in Paris, among others. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
2022 he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the DFG for his outstanding research achievements in the field of economics. In particular, he was singled out for his new linkage of macroeconomics with economic history and his insights into the causes of financial crises and the historical development of wealth distribution: Following the 2008 financial crisis, Schularick showed that financial crises typically follow periods of strong credit growth. He thus contributed to a better understanding of crisis dynamics that may help predict and mitigate future financial crises. More recently, Schularick focused his research interest on the causes of social inequality. To this end, he analyzed the development of capital and real estate returns and was thus able to identify aspects of unequal resource endowments as essential for the increase in social inequality.