Schnabel was born in Dortmund. After completing her training as a bank clerk at Deutsche Bank in Dortmund, she began her studies in economics at the University of Mannheim in 1992. She continued her study of economics at the Paris I (Sorbonne) and the University of California, Berkeley before earning her diploma from the University of Mannheim in November 1998 as best in class. Schnabel studied as a doctoral student in economics at the University of Mannheim from 1998 to 2003, where she graduated summa cum laude after writing her dissertation titled “Macroeconomic Risks and Financial Crises – A Historical Perspective.”[citation needed][3]
Career
Career in academia
After receiving her diploma in 1998, Schnabel started her doctorate studies in the graduate program "Allocation on financial markets" at the Department of Economics, University of Mannheim until 2003. That same year, she also wrote a dissertation, Macroeconomic Risks and Financial Crises – A Historical Perspective, under the supervision of Martin Hellwig. Following that, she then worked as a student research assistant to Axel Börsch-Supan while she completed internships at Deutsche Bank in Saint Petersburg and Frankfurt. For the next three years, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn.
In 2007 Schnabel became a professor of financial economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 2014 she was appointed as member of the German Council of Economic Experts (Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung) and started teaching financial economics at the University of Bonn in 2015.[4]
Member of the executive board of the ECB, 2019–present
On the executive board, Schnabel is responsible for market operations. In this capacity, she oversees the ECB's 5.6 trillion-euro ($6.8 trillion) quantitative easing program.[7]
Other activities
Regulatory agencies
Deutsche Bundesbank, member of the scientific advisory board of the Research Data and Service Centre (RDSC) (since 2016)
Schnabel is considered to have moderate views on monetary policy.[10] In early 2019, she strongly advised against a possible merger of Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank.[11]
