Center for Economic Stuidies (CES)
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About Us

The Center for Economic Studies (CES) is an independent institute within the Faculty of Economics of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU), founded by Hans-Werner Sinn and since 2016 headed by Clemens Fuest as director.

Aims and Purposes

CES has welcomed hundreds of visitors and hosted many conferences, lec-tures and workshops over the years since its foundation in 1991. The guidelines for our program are set by the international expertise of the CES Council members. Our work is closely linked to the ifo institute, LMU’s Economics Department and the CESifo research network:

  • CES hosts an international guest program:
    We invite visiting scholars to do research in Munich and teach in the faculty's graduate program. Special focus is put on collaboration with members of LMU’s Economics Department and the ifo Institute. CES organizes a range of events (lectures, seminars, summer school, conferences) to support these research and networking activities.
    Guest researchers are considered to become part of the CESifo Research Network.
  • CES annually awards the CES Distinguished Fellowship to an internationally outstanding economist who then gives the Munich Lectures in Economics
  • CES hosts the Junior Faculty Fellows, a competitive award given annually to junior economists from Munich, to support outstanding young researchers
  • CES is a co-publisher of Economic Policy, Europe's leading academic journal in the field of economic policy.

History

CES resulted from a counter-offer the Bavarian Ministry of Education made to Hans-Werner Sinn in 1988. It was intended to serve as a visitors' center for academic economists invited from all over the world for research and teaching in Munich. It was officially founded on 18 January 1991 and welcomed its first visitors - among them Gary Becker, David Bradford, Richard Musgrave, and David Wildasin - in April of the same year. Further developments in 1993 paved the way to today's status quo, providing CES with additional guest apartments and making attendance at CES lectures obligatory for doctoral students in economics.
In 1994, CES became a co-publisher of Economic Policy, Europe's leading scientific journal in that field. 1994 also saw the birth of the Munich Lectures in Economics, which were given that year by the first Distinguished CES Fellow, Avinash Dixit. Since then these events have become an integral part of the academic life of the economics faculty. The list of the previous prize winners includes such renowned personalities as Tony Atkinson (deceased 2017), Jean Tirole (Nobel Laureate 2014), Paul Krugman (Nobel Laureate 2008), Rudi Dornbusch (deceased 2002), Guido Tabellini, Peter Diamond (Nobel Laureate 2010), Oliver Hart (Nobel Laureate 2016), Nicholas Stern, James Poterba, Andrei Shleifer, Bruno Frey, Alberto Alesina, Philippe Aghion, Olivier Blanchard, Robin Boadway, Richard Blundell, Partha Dasgupta, Esther Duflo, Ernst Fehr, Kenneth Rogoff, Daron Acemoglu, Bengt Holmstrom (Nobel Laureate 2016), Susan Athey, and Torsten Persson.

In 1998, CES became one of the first institutions world-wide to offer the opportunity to join its community of economic discussion virtually via the internet. The Munich Lectures in Economics as well as other outstanding seminars can be easily watched as internet video lectures.

In the same year the Center also substantially enlarged its own in-house research group producing a sustainable and constant stream of first-class economics research, published in international refereed journals.

Yet this is not the end of the story. Since 1999 CES has been in close cooperation with the ifo Institute, an independent, non-profit organisation focussing on empirical policy studies. Both institutes now meet under an umbrella organisation, the CESifo Group, to build bridges between theoretical and empirical economic investigation and between researchers from all over the world. This is the new starting point for the next decade of cutting-edge international economic research in Munich.

In 2016 an era came to an end. The presidency of Hans-Werner Sinn at the ifo Institute ended along with his professorship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) and his function as Director of the Center for Economic Studies (CES) and Head of CESifo GmbH.

Since then Clemens Fuest holds this positions as ifo President, Chair of Public Economics at the Department of Economics at the LMU, the directorship of the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the LMU and the chief executive position at CESifo GmbH.