John C. Haltiwanger, is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland. He is also the first recipient of the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professorship in 2013. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1981. After serving on the faculty of UCLA and Johns Hopkins, he joined the faculty at Maryland in 1987. In the late 1990s, he served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Census Bureau. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economics.

He has played a major role in developing and studying U.S. longitudinal firm-level data. Using these data, he has developed new statistical measures and analysed the determinants of firm-level job creation, job destruction and economic performance. He has explored the implications of these firm dynamics for aggregate U.S. productivity growth and for the U.S. labour market. The statistical and measurement methods he has helped develop to measure and study firm dynamics have been increasingly used by many statistical agencies around the world.

His own research increasingly uses the data and measures on firm dynamics from a substantial number of advanced, emerging and transition economies. His work with the statistical agencies has been recently recognized in his being awarded the Julius Shiskin Award for economic statistics in 2013 and the Roger Herriott Award for innovation in federal statistics in 2014. He has published more than 100 academic articles and numerous books including Job Creation and Destruction (with Steven Davis and Scott Schuh, MIT Press).