Christoph Matthias Schmidt (born 25 August 1962) is a German economist. He has been President of RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Essen since 2002 and also holds the Chair for Economic Policy and Applied Econometrics at the Faculty of Management and Economics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts from 2009 to 2020 and its chairman from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 he has been a member, and since 2020 co-chairman, of the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts. From 2011 to 2013, he was a member of the Enquete Commission "Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life" of the German Bundestag. From 2020 to 2021 he was a member of the "Corona-Expertenrat" (Corona Council of Experts) of the Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia. He