Who We Are

The Center for Applied Public Economics

The Center for Applied Public Economics (CAPE) at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis - Bruxelles was created at the end of 2018, and works on various research topics in public finance, with a particular attention for labor market policy, mobility, environmental issues and socio-economic inequalities. At the core of CAPE’s research activities is the Beamm project, an effort to build a comprehensive online, open-access tax-benefit microsimulation model. Besides scientific research, CAPE also helps public administrations, policy makers and other interested parties with public policy evaluations, socio-economic impact analyses, spending reviews and other methodological support. CAPE chooses to work with all researchers in a closely knit team, with all team members closely working together on a highly collaborative research project.

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The People Behind Beamm

Team Beamm
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Tom is a professor of public economics at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis - Bruxelles. He is the director of the Center for Applied Public Economics (CAPE), co-director of the Institut de Recherches interdisciplinaires sur Bruxelles (IRIB) and a member of the Center for Research in Economics (CEREC). Tom’s research interest are in public economics, data science, tax design, transport economics and environmental economics. Former research topics include game theory, auction theory and economic history.

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Cedric Heuchenne holds a Master’s degree in Applied Sciences and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the Catholic University of Louvain (2005). He is now working as a Statistics/Data Science professor at the University of Liège. His research concerns different applied and theoretical fields like survival or duration data analysis, nonparametric statistical inference, machine learning, statistical process control, anomaly detection, quality management, or risk modeling.

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Hélène is assistant professor in Economics at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, as well as Chargée de Recherche CNRS. She obtained her PhD in Economics and Management Sciences from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in 2010. She is currently director of the Center for Economic Research (CEREC), and member of the Center for Applied Public Economics (CAPE). Her domains of expertise are Macroeconomics, International Economics and Economic Growth.

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Koen is an Assistant Professor in Economics at UCLouvain – Saint-Louis Bruxelles. He obtained his PhD in 2016 at KU Leuven. After his PhD, he continued as a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven and UCLouvain.

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Gilles holds a Ph.D. from the UCLouvain (2010). He then obtained a post-doc scholarship from the FNRS and is now assistant professor at University Saint-Louis-Bruxelles since 2016. He is the director of the Center for Applied Public Economics (CAPE), and a member of the Center for Research in Economics (CEREC).

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Alexandre holds a double Master’s degree in Economics from UCLouvain and Bocconi University (Milan), and a Master’s degree in Statistics from UCLouvain. He defended his PhD thesis in Statistics in June 2023, entitled « Lorenz regressions, a statistical contribution to the quantification of explained inequality ». Alexandre joined CAPE as postdoctoral researcher and member of the TAXFAM project in September 2023. He is mainly interested in the development of statistical procedures to better quantify and evaluate socioeconomic inequality.

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Francesco obtained a joint PhD in Economics from the UCLouvain (Belgium) and the University of Verona (Italy) in 2021. Francesco joined CAPE as postdoctoral researcher and member of the BEAMM project in 2021. His research interests are: Labor Economics, Quantitative Macroeconomics, and Quantitative Spatial Economics.

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Carlos obtained a bacherlor degree in mathematics from the University of Santiago de Compostela and a European master’s degree in Quantitative Economic Methods and Models from Paris 1 and Ca' Foscari University. After working as a consultant, Carlos joined the Beamm project as a data scientist working on our machine learning algorithms.

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Daniel Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge holds a Bachelor’s in business engineering from the UCLouvain and a double Master’s degree in economics and political sciences from the Economics School of Louvain (UCLouvain) & the University of Milan (UNIMI).

Daniel’s research interests are mainly about public economy issues. He is currently orienting his research project towards tax-benefit systems and their distributional impacts through taxation.

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David completed all his studies at Bocconi University, in Milan (BSc in Economics and Social Sciences, MSc in Economics and Management of Government and International Organizations). David joined the CAPE in March 2020 as fellow researcher and PhD candidate within the framework of the BEAMM project.

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Hugues holds a bachelor in mathematics and two research masters (one in mathematics and one in statistic) from the UC Louvain. After graduating, Hugues began to work at University Saint-Louis-Bruxelles as a full-time assistant.

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Jean Paul Madrigal holds a Master in Economics, with an emphasis on Public Intervention, from the Université Catholique de Louvain. He has worked in applied research for the Mexican Association of Pension Funds, as well as in more academic settings such as El Colegio de México and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research - LISER.

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Rory holds an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree in Quantitative Economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UCLouvain, and Ca' Foscari University of Venice. After graduating, Rory began to work at University Saint-Louis-Bruxelles as a full-time teaching assistant with plans to complete his PhD in Economics. His research interests are focused on but not limited to labor and public economics, more specifically the labor market conditions in the gig economy.

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Astrid graduated with honors from a Master in Economics at the Université Catholique de Louvain in 2020 and from a Bachelor in Economics and Management with an Architecture minor in 2018. During her Master, she participated in the Erasmus+ Program for one semester at the Bocconi University in Milan. Her research interests are public economics and more precisely mobility and its impacts on the population. She also has experience in Spending Reviews.

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Léa Jacquet holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Engineering and a Master’s degree in Data Science and Statistics from from UCLouvain. During her Master’s program, she studied at McGill University in Montreal for one semester, gaining valuable international experience. Throughout her academic journey, Léa was actively involved in organizations such as AIESEC and Alterékot. In September 2023, she began to work as a full-time research assistant with plans to pursue a PhD in economics. Her research interests lie in family economics, public economics, and econometrics.

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Mathilde Pourtois holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and Management with a minor in Political Sciences from UCLouvain. She also has a double Master’s degree in Economics from the Economic School of Louvain (UCLouvain) and Maastricht University. After her studies, she worked for a year as a research assistant in the field of Regional Public Finances at the University of Namur. In 2019, she began her PhD in Applied Labor Economics at IRES (UCLouvain). She joined CAPE in September 2023 with plans to complete her PhD in Economics there. Her research interests include labor economics, education economics, policy evaluation (studying both intended and unintended effects of policies) and public finances.

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Soufiane holds a master’s degree in business engineering from ULB (Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management) and an AESS from the same institution. After completing his master’s, Soufiane worked in secondary education before joining the University of Saint-Louis-Brussels.

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Audric holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the ESL (UCLouvain). Prior to that, he was a student of the University Saint-Louis-Bruxelles. He had the chance to study abroad in Vienna and in Québec. He also enjoyed the student life as a member of Alterékot (kot-à-projet in Louvain-la-Neuve).

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François Meuwissen holds a Bachelor’s degree in business engineering from the UCLouvain and a double Master’s degree in economics and political sciences from the Economics School of Louvain (UCLouvain) & the University of Milan (UNIMI). His research interests are mainly about public economy issues.

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Julie is the administrative manager of the Center for Applied Public Economics (CAPE) and of the Center for Research in Economics (CEREC).

Former Members
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Antoine studied civil engineering and economic sciences at UCLouvain. After a first professional experience at at McKinsey & Company, he started a round-the-word bicycle expedition. Back home, he joined the CEREC as a teaching assistant and PhD student in public economics.

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Vasylyna graduaded with a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from a Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics and a Reasearch Master’s degree in Economics from University of Warsaw and Université Catholique de Louvain. Her research interests fall into the field of public economics and center around the questions of efficiency and equity of public policies aimed to mitigate road congestion.

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Alessandro holds a Master’s degree in Business and Finance from the Università Cattaneo and a PhD from HEC Liège in Economics and Management, with a focus on quantitative methods. His research was focussing on statistical Machine Learning: classification, regression and clustering techniques (linear models, Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, Random Forests). On the Beamm project, Alessandro was one of the core developers.

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Ida-Marie holds a Master’s degree in Economics and Management from Aarhus University. In team beamm, her work has focussed on the machine learning algorithms for statistical matching, and on coding parts of the tax-benefit system.

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Christophe holds a Master’s degree in Economics from UCLouvain and a Master’s degree in Transport Economics from Leeds University. In team beamm, Christophe has mainly be working vehicle taxation. Christophe was also one of the main developers of CoCaTax, a microsimulation model of the fical treatment of company cars.

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Nhi received her degree of PFIEV program in Telecommunications at Hochiminh City University of Technology, which is equivalent to Master’s degree. After graduated, she worked as a Python developer and a researcher before joining the BEAMM project in August 2021 as a research assistant. Her research interest are: data mining, anomaly detection, explainable machine learning.

Beamm Partners

Tax Institute (U.Liège)

We work with the team at the Tax Institute at the University of Liège for their expertise in fiscal law, Belgian institutions and more generally everything related to taxes.

Department of Economics (KU Leuven)

The team of prof. André Decoster has been pioneering in microsimulation modelling in Belgium for many decades. We proudly join forces with the KU Leuven team on the development of Fantasi (microsimulation personal income tax), labor market modelling and many more projects to come.