Economics without Borders: Economic Research for European Policy Challenges

Richard Blundell is the David Ricardo Professor of Economics at University College London. Since 1986 he has also been Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). He has held visiting professor positions at the University of British Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley. He holds Honorary Doctorates from Universität St Gallen, Switzerland, the Norwegian School of Economics, and Universität Mannheim, Germany. He was knighted in the 2014 Queen's New Year's Honours for services to economics and social science. His research covers the empirical analysis of consumer, savings and labour supply behaviour. He has developed new microeconometric tools for the analysis of individual decisions.

Estelle Cantillon is FNRS senior research associate at the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES), Université Libre de Bruxelles, and research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, London. Her research lies at the boundary between market design and industrial organization and typically combines theory and data. She is an Associate Editor at the Rand Journal of Economics and sits on the Economics Council of OXERA, the advisory board of WZB Berlin, and the Executive Committee of Rethinking Belgium. She co-founded the European-wide research network 'Matching in Practice', whose goal is to foster developments at the interface between theory, empirics, experiments and policy on admission procedures in education.

Barbara Chizzolini is an Assistant Professor of Econometrics at Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. She has been teaching and doing applied research in industrial organization, micro foundations, financial time series and econometrics since 1985. She has an undergraduate degree in economics and social sciences from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, and an MA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her main contributions focus on the analysis of banks' and manufacturing firms' behaviour using latent variable models and discrete data, on regional growth econometric modelling, and on nonlinear time series models. She is a member of the Italian Econometrics Society (SIDE).

Marc Ivaldi is Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics and at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Research Fellow at the Institut d'Economie Industrielle, Toulouse, and the Center for Economic Policy Research, London, and Coordinator of the COEURE (COoperation on EUropean Research in Economics) project. He has served as a member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy at the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission and as Scientific Director of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities at the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Specializing in applied industrial organization, he has mainly studied network and transport service industries. He is an expert on empirical methods for competition and regulation policy.

Wolfgang Leininger is Professor of Economic Theory in the Department of Economics at Universität Dortmund. He obtained his education as a mathematician from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and received a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. His research is in the fields of economics, pure and applied game theory, and public and social choice. He is a recipient of the Heisenberg Fellowship of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Heisenberg Medal of the Humboldt Foundation, and the Duncan Black Prize of the Public Choice Society.

Ramon Marimon is Professor of Economics and Pierre Werner Chair at the European University Institute, Florence, on leave from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is the Chairman of the Barcelona GSE, and was Secretary of State for Science and Technology in Spain (2000–2), co-founder of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (1990–1), and President of the Society for Economic Dynamics (2013–15) and of the Spanish Economic Association (2004). He has been advisor of the European Commission on research and development policy, and is the Scientific Coordinator of the European Union's Horizon 2020 research project 'A Dynamic Economic and Monetary Union' (ADEMU), aimed at reassessing the fiscal and monetary framework of the Eurozone.

Frode Steen has been a professor since 2004 at the Norwegian School of Economics, where he is currently serving as Head of the Department of Economics. Since 2005 he has been a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. He is working in the field of empirical industrial organization, and has undertaken studies of several industries and markets, including telecoms/media, cement, shipping, airlines, gasoline, grocery, and salmon. For the last ten years he has focused particularly on the airlines and telecoms/media industries. A primary interest in his work is related to market power, cartels and their functioning. He has also extensive experience as an external competition expert in sector specific regulation and competition cases.