Department of Quantitative Economics

Research department

School of Business and Economics

The Department of Quantitative Economics teaches and conducts research in the areas of Actuarial Science, Econometrics, Mathematical Economics and Operations Research. Both in teaching and in research it achieves excellent standards. The Department of Quantitative Economics is largely in charge of the BSc programme in Econometrics & Operations Research Econometrics & Operations Research | Maastricht University and the MSc programme in Econometrics & Operations Research Econometrics and Operations Research | Maastricht University. Moreover, the department also offers courses in all other BSc and MSc programmes of the SBE. The department publishes papers in highly ranked international scientific journals, such as Journal of Econometrics, Games and Economic Behaviour, and Operations Research.

The department is structured in three groups

These groups cooperate in offering courses for various BSc and MSc programmes and organise seminars. The Econometrics groups organises the Econometrics Seminar, the Mathematical Economics groups organises the GSBE-ETBC Seminar and the M LSE-Seminar, the Operations Research group organises the OR lunch seminar.

Focal areas of research are actuarial science, econometrics and statistics, game theory, and combinatorial optimisation. For more details, see Research.

The researchers across the three groups are also part of the Mathematics Centre Maastricht (MCM) Mathematics Centre Maastricht (MCM)

In the Spotlight

Stephan Smeekes appointed as professor of Econometrics

The SBE Board is pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Stephan Smeekes has been appointed as professor of econometrics. The chair will be positioned within the Department of Quantitative Economics.

Prof. Dr. Smeekes has a strong research profile, having received national awards and nominations, and having published over 20 articles in high-quality international peer-reviewed journals in econometrics and statistics, including interdisciplinary work in environmental sciences. He also has an excellent track record in obtaining external funding, among which the prestigious NWO Veni and Vidi grants, and is an alumnus of the highly prestigious KNAW Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie).

Prof. Dr. Smeekes also has ample experience in high-quality education, with consistently good – and award winning – course evaluations for the bachelor and master courses he coordinates. He is currently the programme leader for the MSc Econometrics and Operations Research.

As chair, Prof. Dr. Smeekes will contribute to developing econometric methodology and tools and promote applications of these methods to address problems and facilitate decision-making within various business and economics disciplines. He will also develop methods suitable for analyzing modern datasets and actively develop contemporary statistics and econometrics education across SBE.

Although the chair's major focus will be on fundamental research, it is dedicated to creating societal impact and actively promoting it. This will be done, for instance, by promoting open science practices and interdisciplinary collaborations.

The SBE Board congratulates Prof. Dr. Smeekes on his promotion and wishes him all the best in his new role as Professor of Econometrics!

Company Visit Deloitte

We were happy to invite Set Supply Chain to Maastricht University. Romy, Thijs and Annelotte taught our Supply Chain Master students about the problems that one generally encounters in Sales and Operations Planning. Then the students could take on several roles in a fictional company and first-hand experience the complexity of cross-departmental communication. A big thank you to Set Supply Chain for this interesting day!

Antoon Pelsser member of the 2022 Parameters Committee

Quality of life

In the period from February to December 2022, I was a member of the 2022 Parameters Committee. This committee has issued an advice to Minister Schouten of Social Affairs and Employment on the calculation model (“the scenario sets”) that pension funds use to measure the impact of the transition from the old to the new pension system. The law states that this transition must be balanced for all participants in the pension fund, and pension funds must use the calculation model to demonstrate that the transition plan meets the requirements. The link to the report is here: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2022/11/29/bijlage-rapport-advies-commissie-parameters-2022

Paper by Stephan Smeekes and Ines Wilms published in Journal of Statistical Software

Science & technology

QE researchers Stephan Smeekes and Ines Wilms have recently published their paper “bootUR: An R Package for Bootstrap Unit Root Tests” in Journal of Statistical Software.

Abstract

Unit root tests form an essential part of any time series analysis. We provide practitioners with a single, unified framework for comprehensive and reliable unit root testing in the R package bootUR. The package's backbone is the popular augmented Dickey-Fuller test paired with a union of rejections principle, which can be performed directly on single time series or multiple (including panel) time series. Accurate inference is ensured through the use of bootstrap methods. The package addresses the needs of both novice users, by providing user-friendly and easy-to-implement functions with sensible default options, as well as expert users, by giving full user-control to adjust the tests to one's desired settings. Our parallelized C++ implementation ensures that all unit root tests are scalable to datasets containing many time series.

The paper can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v106.i12

MMM 2024

Learning & innovation

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 28 years = 5,800 participants found their way to Maastricht.

A German news article on this competition has been posted in the "Rheinische Post".

Toller Erfolg für junge Mathe-Cracks aus Radevormwald

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

UM and student life

For the course Supply Chain Operations Management, Maastricht University partnered with Deloitte to provide students with a unique, hands-on learning experience. Students assumed the role of consultants, tackling a challenging case: devising an expansion strategy for China for a fictional sports apparel company.

The best-performing teams had the incredible opportunity to present their strategies at the Deloitte Headquarters in Amsterdam. The event was a success, offering students not only the chance to showcase their work but also to expand their professional networks.

This collaboration highlights the value of bridging academia and industry, strengthening the bond between Maastricht University and Deloitte's Supply Chain department. Thank you to Matthijs Hermeling for joining me to Amsterdam. We look forward to more fruitful partnerships that prepare our students for their future careers.

Congratulations to all the students who participated!