PRESS RELEASE
Toulouse, November 22nd 2022
Congratulations to Mathias Reynaert, professor of Economics at TSE, for receiving a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.
Mathias Reynaert obtained this 1.5 million euros grant for this project “SPACETIME”: Econometric Models to Evaluate Environmental and Spatial Effects of Long-Lasting Policies. His research focuses on empirical industrial organization and environmental economics.
"I am honoured and delighted to receive this grant. It allows me to have a stable perspective and financial certainty to lead my research for the next five years.
Most importantly, it gives me a feeling of responsibility and duty to get ready to work and meet the ERC standards." Mathias Reynaert
The "SPACETIME” project
“The idea of this project is to examine how policy and spatial distribution of economic activity interact with one another”, explains Mathias Reynaert. It aims at understanding better how important policies in Europe have determined how economy takes up space in this territory.
“There is a clear trade-off between the space that we take for human activity and the one we leave unused: there’s the territory in which we live and create economic activity, those areas cannot be used to let a forest grow or biodiversity settle in. But if humans all concentrate in the same location, pollution and congestion will cause large economic losses. With my co-authors, we will be studying the environmental externalities of land use, congestion and pollution.”
A multi-awarded researcher
Mathias Reynaert obtained his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Leuven and University of Antwerp (Belgium) in 2015. Right afterwards, he became an assistant professor at Toulouse School of Economics. He spent four months at University of Leuven as visiting assistant professor in 2018, then he joined the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) as a visiting scholar in 2019 for seven months.
He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). In 2022, he became Professor at TSE. The focus of his research is the evaluation of taxes and regulations in the European car market.
He was previously awarded with the Paul Gerosku prize, the Edmond Malinvaud prize, a CRESSE best paper award, and the Banque de France prize for Young Researchers in Green Finance.
About the European Research Council
Four hundred eight researchers have won this year’s European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants. The funding is worth in total €636 million and part of the Horizon Europe programme. It will help excellent younger scientists, who have 2 to 7 years’ experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.
The ERC was set up by the European Union in 2007 in order to fund creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. It is the premier European funding aiming at supporting investigator-driven frontier reserach across all fields, based on scientific excellence. Its overall budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than 16 billion euros, as part of the Horizon Europe programme.
About Toulouse School of Economics
TSE is a world-renowned center for research and education hosting more than 150 international faculty including Jean Tirole, 2014 Nobel laureate in economics. Created in 1981 by French economist Jean-Jacques Laffont, it strives to provide solutions to today's key economic and social issues, promote excellence in research and higher education and connect research to policy in France, Europe and worldwide.
Over the past forty years, TSE has emerged as one of the best economics departments in Europe, ranked among the top three beneficiaries in economics of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants. On the wider scale, TSE today ranks 9th economics department worldwide according to the RePEc ranking. TSE is particularly renowned for its scientific contributions in industrial economics, finance, energy and climate economics, and econometrics.
Our competitive international higher education programs within the University of Toulouse pioneer a novel approach to higher education in France. These research-oriented courses train our 2 300 students to master and adapt recent theories and techniques to solve the real-world challenges of their future employers.
Press officer: Caroline Pain - caroline.pain@tse-fr.eu - +33(0)6.08.13.35.16.