Atanas Pekanov, PhD

Atanas Pekanov has been an Economist at WIFO in the Research Group "Macroeconomics and Public Finance" since 2017 with focus on monetary and fiscal policy and EMU architecture. He acquired his PhD at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) in 2024 and his research is focused on the topics of household heterogeneity and how it affects macroeconomic dynamics. Throughout 2021 and 2023 Atanas Pekanov served as the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria in charge of EU funding. His portfolio included negotiating and implementing the Bulgarian Recovery and Resilience Plan, Cohesion Funding and co-coordination of the euro adoption process. He is also a lecture at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He has previously worked at the European Central Bank and was a fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a scholar of the Bulgarian National Bank. He has studied at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and at University College London.