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“Creative Destruction in the Healthcare Sector: Hospital Closures and Patient Outcomes”

With the Lunch Seminar series, the Department of Finance is bringing eminent and up-and-coming researchers from around the world to Luxembourg.

Abstract

Since 1975, the US has seen the net closure of over 800 hospitals, with more ex-pected following the recent $1 trillion reduction in federal healthcare spending. This trend underscores the need to better understand how closures impact patient outcomes. Using confidential patient-level data, we track patients who are displaced from closed hospitals and forced to seek treatment elsewhere, measuring their outcomes pre- and post- closure. We find patients at closing hospitals who subsequently switch to another facility experience better health outcomes, relative to patients who do not lose their hospital. Patients displaced by closures tend to receive treatment at higher quality hospitals characterized by stronger financial performance and higher staffing ratios, suggesting that market exit by inefficient providers may reallocate patients toward better-performing institutions. While average displaced patients find higher quality care, elderly patients in rural areas experience elevated mortality rates, suggesting limited accessibility to substitute providers. Overall, our findings reveal heterogeneous effects of hospital closures: while they may enhance care quality and efficiency for most patients, they pose risks to patient health in immobile populations.

91¶ÌÊÓƵ the speaker

is Professor of Finance at ESMT Berlin. At the same time, she is the head of the Department of Laws, Regulations and Factor Markets at IWH Halle Institute for Economic Research.

Language

English.

This is a free event. Registration is mandatory.

Cold lunches are provided to registered participants only.

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House Prices and Quantities Around the World

With the Lunch Seminar series, the Department of Finance is bringing eminent and up-and-coming researchers from around the world to Luxembourg.

Abstract

We establish several first-order facts using house price and quantity data for middle- and high-income countries. First, housing units and rooms per person rise with per capita income and then asymptote so that additional increases in income are uncorrelated with housing quantities. Second, growth in housing units is strongly correlated with population growth at all incomes. Third, real house prices and housing expenditure shares rise in near-constant proportion with per capita income. A model with non-homothetic demand for housing space, homothetic demand for housing quality, and upward-sloping supply of the unit-quality housing bundle can explain these relationships. Our findings are consistent with Baumol cost disease interpretations of global housing affordability, but are not indicative of increasingly tight supply constraints, as a model where the quantity of housing asymptotes because supply is increasingly inelastic does not match the facts.

91¶ÌÊÓƵ the speaker

is a Distinguished Endowed Chair in Macroeconomics and Public Finance and Professor at UC San Diego.

Language

English.

This is a free event. Registration is mandatory.

Cold lunches are provided to registered participants only.

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“Parsing the pulse: Decomposing macroeconomic sentiment with LLMSâ€�

Abstract

Macroeconomic indicators provide quantitative signals that must be pieced to gether and interpreted by economists. We propose a reversed approach of parsing press narratives directly using Large Language Models (LLM) to recover growth and inflation sentiment indices. A key advantage of this LLM-based approach is the ability to decompose aggregate sentiment into its drivers, readily enabling an interpretation of macroeconomic dynamics. Our sentiment indices track hard-data counterparts closely, providing an accurate, near real-time picture of the macroe conomy. Their components–demand, supply, and deeper structural forces–are in tuitive and consistent with prior model-based studies. Incorporating sentiment indices improves the forecasting performance of simple statistical models, pointing to information unspanned by traditional data

91¶ÌÊÓƵ the speaker

is Acting Head of the Monetary and Economic Department and Head of Economic Analysis and Statistics. He is a member of the Bank’s senior management team.

Language

English.

This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.

Cold lunches are provided to registered participants.

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Abstract

How a small country can do its part to protect international law, human rights, and international humanitarian law in the digital space in 2026. Luxembourg’s thematic ambassador for cybersecurity and digitalisation Luc Dockendorf will offer an overview over cybersecurity challenges, multilateral cooperation, human rights protection online, and striving for digital sovereignty at a time when it looks like things are really falling apart.

91¶ÌÊÓƵ the speaker

Luc Dockendorf is an Ambassador for Cybersecurity and Digitalisation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Luxembourg.

Language

English.

This is a free hybrid event. Registration is mandatory.

The event will run from 12.30 until 14.00. A cold lunch will be offered from 12.00.

• Find out more about the Chair in Cyber Policy

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Economic Analysis for Food Systems Transformation: Global-Local-Global Approach

Abstract

Food systems are a major driver of planetary boundary exceedance (Richardson et al. 2023). As climate uncertainty intensifies and an increasingly affluent global population increases food demand, ambitious environmental policies are essential to sustainably manage the limited stock of natural resources. This presentation highlights how economic analysis can deepen our understanding of the market-mediated effects of conservation efforts through a global-local-global lens.

Environmental challenges, like biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, and excessive nutrient leaching, are experienced locally. Yet their drivers often operate globally through commodity markets as global population and incomes increase. Labour markets, operating between these global and local scales, further shape the effectiveness and distributional impacts of conservation policies (Ray and Hertel 2025; Ray 2025), particularly as farm labor scarcity intensifies.

This talk draws on recent advances in economic analysis that connect global drivers to decisions by local producers at a fine spatial scale while considering the mediating impacts of sub-national markets. This approach can inform policies targeting food systems transformation while minimizing unintended economic and distributional consequences.

91¶ÌÊÓƵ the speaker

• 

  Dr. Srabashi RAY

  LCSES

  Research scientist

  Learn more

Language

English

This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.

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PRIVILEGED Conference

Abstract

The PRIVILEGED final conference brings together leading scholars, EU officials, and practitioners to explore one of the most pressing issues in European and cross-border administrative and criminal enforcement: the balance between confidentiality, secrecy, and professional privileges on the one hand, and effective investigations on the other. Hosted at the 91¶ÌÊÓƵ, this two-day event will present the key findings of the PRIVILEGED research project, which examines how professional privileges shape both administrative and criminal proceedings across EU Member States.Against this background, the conference will address critical questions: how should confidentiality be balanced with transparency? How do different branches of law – criminal, banking, financial, competition, and tax – approach the tension between enforcement powers, confidentiality, and procedural rights? Do professional privilege regimes operate consistently across these fields, or do they create fragmentation that affects the effectiveness of investigations? And ultimately, is harmonization at the EU level needed in this field – and what could it look like?

Language

English.

This is a free event. Registration is mandatory.

Programme

Monday, 18 May 2026

• 13.00

  Welcome lunch

• 14.00 – 14.10

  Welcome address

  • Katalin Ligeti, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Professor of European and International Criminal Law, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

• 14.10 – 15.00

  Introduction to the PRIVILEGED project

  Chair: Katalin Ligeti, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Professor of European and International Criminal Law, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

  • Introductory remarks: The PRIVILEGED Project, Silvia Allegrezza, Professor of Criminal Law, Principal Investigator of PRIVILEGED, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ
  • Insights from the PRIVILEGED comparative report and the draft Directive, Lorenzo Bernardini, Postdoctoral Researcher in Criminal Law, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ
  • Legal Professional Privileges between the CJEU and the ECtHR, Lorena Bachmaier Winter, Professor of Procedural Law, Complutense University of Madrid

• 15.00 – 16.30

  Panel 1: Regards croisés on transparency and confidentiality: The European Union Legal Order (part I)

  Chair: Takis Tridimas, Director of Luxembourg Centre for European Law, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

  Discussants:

  • Confidentiality and secrecy in the CJEU’s case-law, Court of Justice, CJEU (to be confirmed)
  • Transparency and democracy within the EU legal order, Joana Mendes, Professor of European Public Law, LCEL, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ
  • Confidentiality in the EU legal order, Jacob Öberg, Professor of EU Law, University of Southern Denmark
  • Confidentiality, secrecy and transparency in EU Tax Law, Katerina Pantazatou, Professor of Tax Law, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ
  • Confidentiality and secrecy in anti-fraud investigation (OLAF), Salla Saastamoinen, Acting DG and Deputy DG, OLAF

• 16.30 – 17.00

  Coffee break

• 17.00 – 18.30

  Panel 2: Regards croisés on transparency and confidentiality: Focus on criminal justice

  Chair: Stefan Braum, Professor of Criminal law, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ (to be confirmed)

  Discussants:

  • Secrecy and criminal justice, Michele Panzavolta, Professor of Criminal Law, KU Leuven
  • Business secrecy and criminal justice, Carsten Momsen, Professor of Criminal Law, Freie University Berlin
  • Investigative secrecy, SÅ‚awomir Steinborn, Professor of Criminal Procedure, University of GdaÅ„sk
  • Non-legal Professional privileges, Anna Mosna, Assistant Professor of Criminal Law, Leiden University
  • Legal Professional Privilege, Holger Matt, Lawyer, Honorary Professor, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main

• 19.00

  Conference dinner

Tuesday, 19 May 2026

• 09.00 – 11.00

  Panel 3: Regards croisés on transparency and confidentiality: : The European Union Legal Order (part II)

  Chair: Silvia Allegrezza, Professor of Criminal Law, Principal Investigator of PRIVILEGED, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

  Discussants:

  • Confidentiality and monetary policy within the ECB, Chiara Zilioli, Director General, Legal Services, European Central Bank
  • Confidentiality within the SSM: vertical dimension, Stefano Montemaggi, Legal Service, Bank of Italy
  • Confidentiality, secrecy and transparency in EU financial supervision, Nikolai Badenhoop, Head of Junior Research Group, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE
  • Confidentiality and secrecy in AML-CTF, Janneke De Smet-Dierckx, Strategic Programme Lead, Anti-Money Laundering Authority of the European Union (AMLA)
  • Banking secrecy: a transversal analysis, Olivier Voordeckers, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

• 11.00 – 11.30

  Coffee break

• 11.30 – 13.00

  Panel 4 – Confidentiality, secrecy and privileges: the enforcement approach

  Chair: Carsten Momsen, Professor of Criminal Law, Freie University Berlin

  Discussants:

  • Confidentiality and secrecy: toward an EU harmonization?, Laura Stelzer, Legal Advisor, Legal and Policy Officer, DG Just, EU Commission
  • Confidentiality and secrecy. Experience from EUROPOL, Giovanni D’Auria, Institutional and Legal Affairs Department, Europol
  • Confidentiality and secrecy. Experience from the EPPO, Emmanuel Farhat, Legal Service, European Public Prosecutor’s Office
  • Confidentiality and secrecy: a continental view, Valentina Covolo, Legal expert, Parquet financier du Tribunal de Luxembourg

• 13.00

  Closing remarks

  Silvia Allegrezza, Professor of Criminal Law, Principal Investigator of PRIVILEGED, 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

In partnership with

• Find out more about the PRIVILEGED Research Project

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The fifth edition of the Gender and Economics Workshop will be held at the 91¶ÌÊÓƵ, Luxembourg City, on 21–22 May 2026. The workshop is organised by the Department of Economics and Management of the 91¶ÌÊÓƵ and LISER. The event aims to bring together scholars presenting cutting-edge research in economics, with a particular focus on gender, culture, family, fertility, and diversity.

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
We have the great honor to welcome the following keynote speakers:
Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University) and Klaus Desmet (SMU)

ORGANIZING AND SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Luisito Bertinelli, Anastasia Litina, Hillel Rapoport, Eva Sierminska, Skerdi Zanaj

By invitation only

Benelux PECO is an annual political economy conference jointly organized across the Benelux region, held in Luxembourg (2023, 2026), Brussels (2024), and Rotterdam (2025).

The aim of this cross-disciplinary conference, co-organised with the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Erasmus University Rotterdam, is to bring together a community of top economists and political scientists from the world’s leading universities and provide an opportunity for them to discuss cutting-edge research in political economy:

• How do government institutions shape economic policy? 
• How can they help, or hamper, policymakers in facing the many challenges and uncertainties of a rapidly changing world (political polarisation, conflicts, climate change, technological progress, inequality,…)? 
• How could those institutions be improved?

These are among the many pressing questions that scholars of government from economics and political science are well suited to answer. Initiated by Vincent Anesi, professor within the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, the aim of Benelux PECO is to create a European counterpart to the existing Washington PECO, in facilitating stronger interdisciplinary cooperations among the world’s leading experts on government and public policy to make progress on such issues.

This workshop is by invitation only. Consult the

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Contextual Distributional Robust Optimization under Decision-Dependent Uncertainty: A Residuals-Based Approach

Abstract

Contextual Stochastic Optimization (CSO) has emerged as a way model and solve real-world decision-making problems by integrating Machine Learning (ML) with optimization under uncertainty. Many CSO models consider contextual (or side) information that is separate from the decisions. However, in many real-world applications, the decisions of the optimization model significantly affect the uncertain parameters, hence becoming contexts themselves. For example, pricing decisions impact the uncertain demand of a product.

In this talk, we first introduce a methodology for modeling decision‑dependent uncertainty using a residuals-based stochastic optimization approach. We use various ML methods to learn how decisions shape uncertainty and then build a distribution (and thereby ambiguity set) around these predictions using empirical residuals. We form a Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) model using the Wasserstein distance, and investigate its theoretical guarantees, including asymptotic optimality and finite sample results. The resulting model is computationally challenging. Therefore, we devise a specialized Benders decomposition algorithm with nonlinear cutting planes to solve the resulting model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on a pricing and shipment planning problem.

91¶ÌÊÓƵ the speaker

is a Professor and Associate Chair for Research in the Integrated Systems Engineering Department and an affiliated faculty member of the Sustainability Institute and the Translational Data Analytics Institute at the Ohio State University. Her research interests are in optimization under uncertainty, particularly stochastic and distributionally robust optimization, using data-driven, contextual, and Monte Carlo simulation-based methods. She applies these models and methods to solve problems of critical societal interest in water, energy, and transportation systems. Her papers have appeared in top journals such as Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization and Operations Research, and her research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DoE). She is the recipient of INFORMS ENRE Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability, Lumley Research Award (OSU), NSF CAREER award, Five Star Faculty Award (UA), and the INFORMS Best Case Study award. She served as the Chair of Stochastic Programming Society (SPS) (2019-2023), the Vice Chair of Optimization under Uncertainty of INFORMS Optimization Society, and the President of the INFORMS Forum on Women in Operations Research and Management Science.

Language

English

This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.

In collaboration with

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This conference is organised by the Department of Law of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance of the 91¶ÌÊÓƵ and the Robert Schuman Initiative (RSI) with the support of the Erasmus + Programme of the European Commission.

Abstract

This conference explores the evolving contours of the European Union’s fiscal constitution, focusing on the interplay between the EU budget, own resources, and the Union’s emerging capacity to raise revenue. Against the backdrop of recent crises and transformative policy developments, most notably the NextGenerationEU instrument, the reform of fiscal governance, and new own resources proposals, the conference brings together leading scholars to examine the legal, economic, and constitutional dimensions of fiscal integration in the European Union.

The conference will engage with key structural questions of fiscal federalism, exploring the constitutional architecture of EU fiscal powers, the implications of common debt issuance, and comparative perspectives on the design of revenue systems in multi-level systems. It will trace the evolution of fiscal governance in the European Union, with particular attention to the shifting balance between discipline, solidarity, and sovereignty, the ongoing transformation of the Stability and Growth Pact, and the expanding role of financial assistance instruments.

At the same time, the conference reflects on the changing role of the EU budget, from its traditional focus on cohesion policy to its increasing involvement in areas such as defence and external action, thereby highlighting its growing strategic significance in the pursuit of broader policy objectives. It also addresses fundamental questions concerning the EU’s power to tax and the future of own resources, examining both the constitutional limits of EU fiscal authority and the prospects for deeper fiscal integration.

By bringing together perspectives from law, economics, and political science, the conference aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the EU’s fiscal constitution at a time of significant transformation, and to reflect on its implications for the future of European integration.

Language

English.

This is a free event. Registration is mandatory.

Programme

• 09.00 – 09.10

  Welcome,

  Dr. Katerina Pantazatou (91¶ÌÊÓƵ)

• 09.10 – 10.30

  Fiscal Federalism and Fiscal Union(s)

  Chair: Dr. Katerina Pantazatou (91¶ÌÊÓƵ)

  Speakers:

  • Prof. Gianluigi Bizioli (University of Bergamo): ‘The Constitutional Architecture of the European Union Fiscal Federalism’
  • Prof. David Howarth (91¶ÌÊÓƵ): ‘A Union of debt?’
  • Dr. Ricardo Garcia Anton (Tilburg University): ‘Comparative Federalism and the Design of the EU Revenue side’

• 10.30 – 11.00

  Coffee Break

• 11.00 – 12.45

  Fiscal Governance in the EU: Discipline, Solidarity and Sovereignty

  Chair: Prof. David Howarth (91¶ÌÊÓƵ)

  Speakers:

  • Dr. Maria Antonia Panasci (Mercatorum University): ‘NGEU and the Transformation of the EU Fiscal Constitution’
  • Dr. Klaus Tuori and Dr. Fernando Losada (91¶ÌÊÓƵ): ‘The green dimension of financial assistance in the EU’
  • Prof. Christos Gortsos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens): ‘The asymmetry between the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Monetary’ in the EMU’ (online)
  • Dr. Frédéric Allemand (91¶ÌÊÓƵ): ‘Between Discipline, Solidarity and Sovereignty: The SGP and the EU’s New Fiscal Toolbox’

• 12.45 – 14.00

  Lunch break

• 14.00 – 15.30

  The use of the EU budget: From cohesion policy to EU defence

  Chair: Prof. Eleftheria Neframi (91¶ÌÊÓƵ)

  Speakers:

  • Dr. Thibault Martinelli (University of Salzburg): ‘Cohesion in the Next MFF: Structural Funds and the Transformation of the EU Budgetary Architecture’
  • Dr. Luigi Lonardo (91¶ÌÊÓƵ): ‘Support loans and the EU’s external policy’
  • Dr. Rosalba Famà (New York University & Bocconi University): ‘Financing the EU defence – the SAFE instrument and the expanding role of the EIB’ (online)

• 15.30 – 16.00

  Coffee break

• 16.00 – 17.30

  The EU’s power to tax and own resources

  Chair: Prof. Gianluigi Bizioli (University of Bergamo)

  Speakers:

  • Dr. Martha Caziero (Tilburg University): ‘The EU’s power to tax’
  • Dr. Sam van der Vlugt (Erasmus University Rotterdam): ‘The new own resources proposals and the way forward’
  • Dr. Tomasz Woźniakowski (University of WrocÅ‚aw): ‘Taxing Powers and Political Union: The Constitutional Future of the European Union’

In collaboration with

• Find out more about the Robert Schuman Initiative for European Affairs