The C.D. Howe Institute announced on Friday the appointment of Finn Poschmann as director of research, effective immediately.

Poschmann was selected after a formal search involving a number of candidates. “Finn Poschmann is a prize-winning researcher and outstanding policy thinker,“ said William Robson, C.D. Howe Institute’s president and CEO. “We saw several impressive candidates, but Finn’s combination of broad knowledge of Canadian economic and social policy challenges, and penetrating insights about potential solutions, marked him as truly outstanding.“

Poschmann becomes director of research after a three-year tenure as associate director of research at the institute, which he joined in 1998. Among other duties, he currently serves as the internal program director for the institute’s Tax Competitiveness Program and its Financial Services Research Initiative. He has also had a distinguished career as an author and policy commentator.

Poschmann has written on tax policy and public finance, federal-provincial relations and social policy, among other topics. His 2001 paper on tax-prepaid savings, for example, written with C.D. Howe Institute research fellow Jonathan Kesselman, won the Canadian Tax Foundation’s Douglas J. Sherbaniuk Distinguished Writing Award. That work laid the cornerstone for subsequent policy debate about the proper tax treatment of retirement saving in Canada.

Poschmann’s educational background is in economics, and prior to his arrival at the institute he spent more than a decade in various roles at the Parliamentary Research Branch in Ottawa, where he provided research and advice to parliamentarians and committees of the Senate and House of Commons on a wide range of fiscal and monetary topics.