ECARES

About ECARES

The European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) is a research centre at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Its broad objective is to foster excellence in research and high-quality graduate education in economics, econometrics, and statistics.

Inaugurated in 1991 as the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics (ECARE), it started as a joint initiative of the Institut d’Études européennes (IEE) at ULB and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a network of around 500 researchers in Europe. In 1999, ECARE became ECARES, following the merger with the Centre d’Économie Mathématique et d’Économétrie (CEME) and the collaboration with statisticians from the Institut de Statistique et de Recherche Opérationnelle (ISRO).

ECARES fellows are leading researchers in a number of fields, including the behaviour and organisation of firms and markets, international trade, political economy, the theory and empirics of household behaviour, the theory and applications of econometrics, and the development of non-parametric and robust statistical methods. Many of them are very active in CEPR (as research directors, programme directors, research fellows, or research affiliates). Several have received grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and other prestigious prises and awards.

In close connection with its research activities, ECARES has developed a Doctoral School, offering internationally competitive, high quality PhD programmes in Economics as well as in Economics and Statistics. The ECARES Doctoral School attracts many first-class European and non-European students. The outstanding quality of its PhD programmes is reflected in the success of its graduates on the academic job market.
ECARES collaborates with CORE (the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics at the Université Catholique de Louvain) and the department of economics at KU Leuven, with which it has created a common centre of excellence, ECORES, integrating the research activities and doctoral programmes of all three institutions.

Fields of Expertise

• Applied Mathematics
• Competition and Research Policy
• Corporate and Public Governance
• Development Economics
• Econometrics
• Economics of Art and Culture
• Environmental Economics
• European Integration and International Trade
• Experimental and Behavioral Economics
• Financial Econometrics
• Financial Economics
• Industrial Organization, Contracts and Auctions
• Macroeconomic Theory, Growth and Cycles
• Nonparametric and Robust Statistics
• Political Economics and Collective Decisions
• Time Series Analysis