Center for Research in Finance and Management (CeReFiM)

The Center for Research in Finance and Management studies issues in finance and macroeconomics. In recent years, several research programmes have been carried out on specific topics such as complex financial systems, sustainable finance and systemic risk in the mutual fund industry. In most cases, research questions are addressed from an empirical perspective with the use of up-to-date econometric techniques. As it stands, the CeReFiM consists of a balanced group of both senior (7 academics) and junior (7 Ph.D. students) members working in close collaboration with one another as well as with academics and financial practitioners from numerous universities and financial institutions in Belgium and abroad.

 

 

The research activity of CeReFiM members materializes into regular publications in international peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Banking and Finance, and the Journal of International Money and Finance, to cite a few.

CeReFiM researchers also regularly participate to major international conferences such as the Annual Congress of the European Economic Association (EEA), the European Meeting of the Econometric Society (ESEM), the Infiniti Conference on International Finance, the Paris December Finance Meeting, the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI) Conference, the Computational Financial Econometrics (CFE) Conference, the International Association for Applied Econometrics (IAAE) Conference and the International Statistical Institute World Statistics Congress (ISI WSC).  The center also promotes short-term research stays, both for foreign researchers in Namur and for CeReFiM members in foreign institutions. Past research stays include for example the University of Maryland, the University of Santa Cruz, the Santa Fe Institute, the Federal Reserve in Saint-Louis and the European Central Bank.

Eventually, CeReFiM members attract funding from various sources such as the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS), and private partners (e.g. Ageas and BNP Paribas Fortis) within research chairs.

 

CeReFiM’s current research themes

 

  • Monetary economics: current research in monetary economics concentrates on the modelling of central banks’ decisions and the impact of central banks’ policies.

 

  • Asset management: research is mainly concerned with modelling investment behaviour, assessing institutions’ trading skills and investigating asset classes’ properties.

 

  • Sustainable finance: research in sustainable finance focuses on the financial performance of impact and socially responsible investments, as well as on the motivations underlying sustainable investors’ decisions.

 

  • Financial econometrics and quantitative methods: current research in financial econometrics relates to financial markets’ volatility and microstructure, financial institutions, corporate finance and governance, high-frequency data and the estimation of DSGE models with survey data.

 

  • Financial macroeconomics: research aims to improve researchers’ understanding of the interactions between the financial and the real economy.