About Us

The Center for Research in Finance and Management (CeReFiM) is part of the Faculty of Economics of Business at the University of Namur. The Center studies aspects of financial management from the industrial firm or sovereign perspective as well as its interactions with financial markets. Such analysis is carried out at both the theoretical and empirical level.

STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION

The CeReFiM comprises seven faculty members and eleven doctoral students working in close collaboration with one another as well as with academics and financial practitioners across numerous universities and financial institutions within Europe and abroad.

The vitality of the center is evidenced by a constantly expanding list of publications in high-ranking peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Empirical Finance as well as the Journal of Financial Econometrics and the European Economic Review.

 

Read more on the Members and Collaborations of the Center.

RESEARCH AND DOMAINS OF EXPERTISE

As an interdisciplinary research center, the CeReFiM’s expertise revolves inter alia around the application and development of tools from various fields in finance and economics to the understanding of financial markets and practices at both the firm and sovereign-level. To this end, researchers at the CeReFIM work on a wide range of topics, both theoretical and empirical, including:

  • corporate finance (venture capital, private equity)
  • central banking (communication policies, monetary policy transmission)
  • risk management (risk measures, systemic risk, risk-taking by financial institutions)
  • financial econometrics (volatility, microstructure of financial markets).

The CeReFiM is part of the BeFinD-ACROPOLIS consortium which comprises four Belgian universities and Research Center: IOB (UAntwerp), HIVA (KULeuven), GGS (KULeuven), and UNamur. The project aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of the broad question of Financing for Development. The research output is directly aimed at providing relevant policy advice to the Belgian Development Cooperation. Besides more micro-based approach, the ACROPOLIS project deals with reforms of the tax system and debt management solutions.

Several members of the center are also affiliated to the ARC project on Financial CompleX Systems (FiXS) project which, in collaboration with researchers from the Université catholique de Louvain, aims to apply tools from the rapidly growing field of complex systems science to the study of financial markets and financial agent interactions. Within this framework, CeReFiM researchers are developing new theoretical and empirical approaches to better understand a number of issues pertaining to systemic risk, financial stability and contagion, financial networks and monetary policy transmission.

 

Read more on the Research Domains of the Center.

ACTIVITIES

In order to maintain a presence within the international academic community, CeReFiM members regularly present their research at conferences and colloquia across the world. Moreover, CeReFiM members publish their work in international peer-reviewed journals.

Moreover, connections with the international research community are well-established at the CeReFiM via short-term research stays of foreign researchers in Namur and short periods abroad (between three to six months) of CeReFiM's members in foreign institutions including the University of Maryland, the University of Santa Cruz, the Santa Fe Institute, the Federal Reserve in Saint Louis, the ECB, etc.

Another key strength of the Center is its involvement in the organization of educational events and conferences, aimed at bringing together researchers from around the world and from a wide variety of disciplines. Most recently, a five-day winter school on “networks in economics and finance” was co-organized by the CeReFIM. Through a set of keynote lectures, student presentations and informal coffee breaks, the goal of the school was to promote the dissemination of new ideas between participants and allow for discussions with leading researchers in the field. In 2009, a conference was held in Namur entitled ‘New Challenges to Central Banking in the Global Financial System’ comprising an audience of more than 50 people and hosting speakers from both academia (KULeuven, University of Maastricht, etc.) and major international institutions (the IMF, the OECD, the ECB, the National Bank of Belgium, the Bank of France, etc.).

Finally, the CeReFiM builds its internal capacity by encouraging researchers at all levels to present their work at the monthly internal seminar. This serves to foster a collaborative atmosphere as well as allow members to benefit from an active discussion, given the interdisciplinary nature of the Center. 

 

Read more on the Activities and Publicatons of the Center.

 

Contact

Rempart de la Vierge, 8, 5000 Namur
Tel: 081/725302
Fax: 081/724840
Mail: