Faculty

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Jan Eeckhout

Jan Eeckhout is ICREA Research Professor of Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and at the Barcelona School of Economics. His research focuses on the macroeconomic implications of market power, as well as the economics of labor markets and cities. His work has been widely featured in the media, including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and Bloomberg.

Prior to joining UPF, Jan held tenured positions at the University of Pennsylvania and University College London. He has been the Louis A. Simpson Visiting Professor at Princeton University and held visiting positions at NYU and MIT. He holds an Engineering and Economics degree from KU Leuven and a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Meet Our Faculty

Bruno Cassiman

Bruno Cassiman is Professor of Strategy at the Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation at KU Leuven in Belgium. Before joining KU Leuven full-time he was Professor of Strategy and the Nissan Chair of Corporate Strategy and International Competitiveness in the Strategic Management Department of IESE Business School in Barcelona. His research interests have centred on the economics of strategy and innovation with a particular focus on the connections between science and industry in the innovation process and the complementarity between different innovation activities.  His work has been published in the leading Economics and Management journals such as The American Economic Review, Management Science, The Strategic Management Journal, The International Journal of Industrial Organization, and many more.

Ambre Elsas-Nicolle

Ambre Elsas-Nicolle is a tenured Assistant Professor at Mines Paris – PSL, affiliated with the Centre for Economics and Public Decisions (CEDP) and holder of the Chaire TNEF. Before joining Mines Paris, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Munich (LMU) and at ENSAI-CREST. Her research focuses on the demand and supply sides in network and cultural industries, using structural approaches to model consumer behavior and reduced-form methods to study prices and product variety. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Strategy Science, and the Journal of Industrial Economics.

Paul Heidhues


Paul Heidhues is Professor of Behavioral and Competition Economics at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE). Before joining DICE, he held the Lufthansa Chair in Competition and Regulation at ESMT Berlin, and was Associate Professor for Economic Theory at the University of Bonn. His research covers industrial organization and competition policy, with a particular focus on the functioning of markets when consumers are driven by psychological factors such as loss aversion, time-inconsistency, or naivete. His work has been published in leading journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica and the Review of Economic Studies.

Christian Helmers


Christian Helmers is Professor of Economics and Department Chair at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. Before joining Santa Clara, he was Assistant Professor at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and a research economist at the London School of Economics. He has been a visiting research scholar at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). His research focuses on innovation, intellectual property, and the economics of digitization. He has been involved in policy work for WIPO, the European Patent Office, and the UK Intellectual Property Office. His work has been published in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, and Quantitative Economics. He holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Amandine Léonard


Amandine Léonard is Assistant Professor in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Edinburgh Law School, where she serves as Programme Director of the LLM in Law and Co-Director of the SCRIPT Centre. Before joining Edinburgh, she was a legal researcher at the Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP) at KU Leuven. Her research focuses on patent law and enforcement strategies, the interface between competition law and intellectual property, and issues of liability for patent infringement in the fourth industrial revolution. She has been a visiting researcher at Stanford Law School and an Emile Noel Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center of NYU School of Law. She holds a PhD in Intellectual Property Law from KU Leuven and an LLM in European Competition and IP Law from the University of Liège.

Bettina Peters


Bettina Peters is Deputy Head of ZEW’s “Economics of Innovation and Industrial Dynamics” Research Department and Honorary Professor in Innovation at the University of Luxembourg. Before joining ZEW in 2000, she was a Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Kiel. Her research covers the economics of innovation at the firm level, with a focus on productivity and employment effects of innovation, dynamics in firm innovation behaviour, and the internationalization of R&D activities. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the RAND Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and Research Policy.

Imke Reimers


Imke Reimers is Associate Professor of Strategy and Business Economics at Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management within the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. She is broadly interested in the industrial organization of digital markets, information, and intellectual property. Her research mainly focuses on three specific questions: 1) how does information technology affect the functioning and efficiency of markets; 2) how do copyright and other forms of intellectual property affect access to information; and 3) how do digital platforms use their market power and what are the consequences of their actions? Imke received a PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota in 2013. She also holds a BS in mathematics and economics from the University of Nebraska. Before joining Cornell, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Northeastern University.

Jo Seldeslachts


Jo Seldeslachts is Professor of Industrial Organization at KU Leuven, Senior Research Fellow at DIW Berlin, and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. His research lies in the fields of industrial organization, competition policy, mergers and acquisitions, common ownership, and industrial policy. He has been involved in policy projects commissioned by the European Commission and the European Parliament, and has advised public bodies on antitrust and competition issues, including the Competition and Markets Authority (UK) and the ACM (The Netherlands). His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of the European Economic Association, AEJ: Microeconomics, and The Review of Economics and Statistics. He earned his PhD in Economics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Joel Stiebale


Joel Stiebale is Professor of Empirical Industrial Economics at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) at Heinrich Heine University. Before joining DICE, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham and a researcher at the Rhine Westphalian Institute for Economic Research (RWI). His research focuses on industrial organization, economics of innovation, and the evolution of market power, including the impact of mergers and acquisitions and the effects of innovation policy. Joel is a member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy (EAGCP) of the European Commission and the Economic Expert Panel of the Competition & Markets Authority in the UK. He holds a PhD from the University of Bochum. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of International Economics.

Florian Szücs


Florian Szücs is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Academic Director of the Economics Master at WU Vienna. He previously held research positions at the University of Vienna and DIW Berlin. His research focuses on empirical industrial organization, with particular interests in mergers and competition policy, innovation, and energy markets. His recent work includes studies on start-up acquisitions by big tech firms and the effects of mergers on market power in European markets. His work has been published in journals such as the RAND Journal of Economics, the European Economic Review, the Economic Journal, and the International Journal of Industrial Organization. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Vienna.

Reinhilde Veugelers


Reinhilde Veugelers is a full professor at KU Leuven at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation.  She is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel since 2009 and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Washington DC),  since 2020.  She is also a CEPR Research Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and of the Academia Europeana. From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave, as advisor at the European Commission (BEPA Bureau of European Policy Analysis).  She served on the ERC Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the EU-RISE Expert Group advising the commissioner for Research. She is currently an editor of the journal Research Policy and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at NBER.
With her research concentrated in the fields of industrial organisation, international economics and strategy, innovation and science, she has authored numerous well cited publications in leading international journals.  Specific recent topics include novelty in science and technology development,  global innovation value chains,  young innovative companies, innovation for climate change,  industry science links and their impact on firm’s innovative productivity, evaluation of research & innovation policy.