Mathias Dewatripont - Biography#

Mathias Dewatripont is a distinguished, and broad, economic theorist. He has been instrumental in the development of contract theory, and its applications to a large variety of topics (Organization economics, renegotiation, soft budget constraint, transition economies, debt and equity, the theory of the firm, corporate governance, industrial policy, costly communication, etc). He has been particularly active in the field of banking, both in theoretical developments and in its practice: he has been Executive Director of the National Bank of Belgium – the central bank of the country – from 2011 to 2017

He has co-authored eight books (co-edited eleven), among them The Prudential Regulation of Banks (with Jean Tirole, MIT Press 1994), Contract Theory (with Patrick Bolton, MIT Press 2005), and Balancing the Banks: Global Lessons from the Financial Crisis (with Jean-Charles Rochet & Jean Tirole, Princeton University Press, 2010). He has also published 47 papers in refereed international journal (for what is worth: 11 in the so-called Top 5) and 14 book chapters. He has delivered many invited lectures and has been invited for research and / or teaching stays at leading world institutions (such us MIT, Stanford, the Hebrew University, etc). From 1990 to 1994 he was the Managing (main) Editor of the RES. He has been recognized by its peers by being elected to the presidency of the European Economic Association (2005), as a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1993) and as a recipient of the Jhansson Prize for Economics (2003).

Professor Dewatripont has also been an institution builder in European Economics. With a Ph.D from Harvard he returned to Europe immediately and has been responsible for building up the excellent Department of Economics, and its associated research center (ECARES), of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 2010 -2011, just before taking up the post at the central bank, he was Dean of the Solvay Business School, also at ULB. Finally, and most importantly, he was a founding member of the Scientific Council of the ERC.