General description
Inaugurated on November 30th, 1991, ECARE started as a joint initiative of the Institut d’Etudes Européennes (IEE) at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a network of around 500 researchers in Europe. The collaboration with statisticians from ULB was officialized in 1999 by the transformation of ECARE into ECARES, the “European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics”, and in 2006, by the integration of the Institute for Research in Statistics. In the begining of 2006, ECARES and CORE (Center for Operation Research and Econometrics, Université catholique de Louvain) have decided to join forces in a common center of excellence, ECORE that integrates the research activities and doctoral programs of both institutions. ECORE ranks among the top five research institutions in Europe, after LSE, Tilburg, Oxford and Cambridge. ECORE has 60 permanent Faculty, some 20 post-doctoral students and 90 doctoral students in residence in Brussels and Louvain-la-Neuve.

These institutional changes have all gone in the direction of strengthening the connection between research in economics, econometrics and statistics while keeping our commitment to excellence and internationalization. Over the years, ECARES researchers have developed expertise in a number of major fields of economics, in particular:

-The evaluation of European integration policies and its dynamics of “deepening” and “widening”,
- The structure and behavior of banking and financial markets,
- The theory and empirics of macroeconomics, including its political economy component,
- The behavior and organization of firms and markets,
- The theory and applications of econometrics,
- The statistical analysis of time series data.

This research activity has given ECARES international visibility and reputation : in September 2004, the European Wall Street Journal was mentioning ECARES in a short list of seven European centres of excellence that were resisting the brain drain to the more attractive US universities.

In close connection to this research, ECARES has developed an important doctoral activity, with the creation of a Doctoral School that attracts many first-class European and Non-European students. ECARES has also received a substantial number of EU-financed "Training and Mobility of Researchers" grants, and participate in several networks in the "Research Training Network" programme.

Its members are also particularly active in CEPR, as Research Director, Programme Directors, Research Fellows or Research Affiliates. Members of ECARES have moreover been serving on the Council of the European Economic Association (EEA) or the Council of the Econometric Society. They have organized major international events, such as a Nobel Symposium, two annual meetings of the EEA, and a World Congress of the Econometric Society.

For more Information
ECARES (European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics)
Prof. Philip Verwimp
ECARES, ULB CP 114
Avenue Roosevelt 50
1050 Brussels
Belgium
phone: +32-2-650 26 78
fax: +32-2-650 44 75
mail
www.ecares.org