Department of Quantitative Economics

9 juli 2026

Prof.dr. Stephan Smeekes and Dr. Ines Wilms have been awarded an €800,000 NWO SSH Open Competition L grant for a new six-year research project entitled Econometric Intelligence for Complex Time Series. The project will develop a new research methodology called Econometric Intelligence, designed to help scientists make sense of increasingly complex data collected over time.

From wearable sensors and satellite observations to social media and citizen science, new technologies are generating unprecedented volumes of data. While these unconventional data sources have enormous potential to improve decision-making, their complexity, messiness, and scale often make them difficult to analyse.

The project addresses this challenge by combining the transparency and interpretability of econometric models with the computational power of modern machine learning. Drawing on expertise from econometrics, statistics and artificial intelligence, the researchers will develop a new generation of methods that can analyse complex time series, quantify uncertainty and uncover cause-and-effect relationships while remaining transparent and explainable.

The new methodology will be applied to a range of pressing societal challenges, including economic policy, healthcare, environmental sustainability and defence. By enabling researchers and policymakers to extract reliable insights from complex data, the project aims to strengthen evidence-based decision-making in an increasingly data-rich world. The six-year project will also create opportunities for early-career researchers, with two PhD positions and four student assistant positions to be recruited as part of the research team.

Commenting on the award, Stephan and Ines say: ‘We're excited to kick off this newly funded project together. Bringing together a talented team and inspiring collaborators is one of the aspects we're looking forward to most, and we can't wait to see the ideas and discoveries that emerge over the coming years.’

16 juli 2026

Assistant Professor of Econometrics Tobias Hartl has been awarded a prestigious NWO Veni grant for his research project UnveilML. The Veni grant enables outstanding early-career researchers to further develop their own innovative research ideas over the coming years.

Many of the factors that shape major policy decisions, such as the true pace of global warming, market-wide financial risk, or the state of the economy, cannot be measured directly. Instead, they must be estimated from large amounts of data. With UnveilML, Tobias combines the strengths of econometrics and machine learning to develop new methods for estimating these hidden factors more accurately. The project aims to create models that are not only capable of handling large, complex datasets, but are also transparent, interpretable, and able to provide reliable measures of uncertainty. By improving how these hidden drivers are estimated, the research has the potential to support better-informed decisions in areas including economic policy, financial stability, and climate science.

To mark the launch of the project, Tobias has written a blog explaining the research behind UnveilML and the challenges it aims to address.
Read his blog article: https://um-sbe.com/4wLKdrt

December 2025, two of our Assistant Professors have been actively expanding our international collaborations through research visits and seminar presentations.

🔹 Tom Demeulemeester visited Péter Biró (KRTK Research Institute & Corvinus University of Budapest), a world-leading expert in matching theory and kidney exchange mechanisms. During his visit, Tom presented his seminar:
“Pairwise efficiency and monotonicity imply Pareto efficiency in (probabilistic) object allocation.”
Péter and Tom advanced their joint project on how alternative allocation mechanisms can improve the assignment of school seats, moving beyond traditional random tie-breaking.

🔹 Lissa Melis visited the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, engaging with Javier Bas, expert in machine learning for transportation economics, and Ana Condeço Melhorado, expert in transport network analysis, urban mobility and accessibility studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Lissa presented her seminar “Beyond Uber: Optimizing the On-Demand Bus Routing Problem”, and explored collaboration opportunities at the intersection of operations research, machine learning, and public transport design.

These visits highlight our department’s commitment to international engagement, cross-disciplinary research, and building a dynamic global network in Operations Research, Econometrics, Mathematical Economics and Data Science.
We look forward to seeing the next steps of these collaborations! ✨

Proud news from our department: our colleague Lissa Melis has been selected as a 2025–26 YoungWomen4OR awardee!

YoungWomen4OR (EURO/WISDOM) brings together an inspiring cohort of early-career women in Operations Research & Management Science, supporting their visibility, community, and growth. We’re delighted to see Lissa’s work—at the intersection of Operations Research and urban transport—recognised on this international stage.

Please join us in congratulating Lissa and the entire 2025–26 cohort! 👏🌟

My new book has just come out! The title is "From Decision Theory to Game Theory: Reasoning about the Decisions of Others". 

It explores games with incomplete information (you are uncertain about the preferences of others), games with unawareness (you are unaware of some of the decisions that others can make) and psychological games (you care about the beliefs that others have about you) from a unified reasoning perspective.

I tremendously enjoyed writing the book, and hope that many students, scientists and casual readers will equally enjoy reading it, and learning from it. And if some people will use it for their own teaching, that would of course be fantastic. 

Holding the book this morning was a wonderful feeling. The sweet end of a long but beautiful journey. ☀️

The Mathematical Modelling competition Maastricht - also known as the MMM - is an annual international math competition for high school students.

Teams of up to five high school students – mostly travelling from Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands – spend their Saturday afternoon solving mathematical puzzles. Meanwhile, their teachers are free to attend lectures by UM researchers.

Since the start of the competition in 1995, an estimated 40 teams x 5 high school students x 30 years = 6,000 participants found their way to Maastricht.

MMM takes place in January. For more information and to sign up go directly to our events page: MMM competitie - Events - Maastricht University