ECGI and Solvay Brussels School
Solvay Brussels School Economics and Management (SBS-EM) has contributed to the origin and the continued development of the ECGI network since the 1990's. Today SBS-EM is a strategic partner of ECGI supporting global scholarship and international collaboration. Learn more about this important partnership below.
Current collaboration
Join us on 7-8 October for the ECGI Annual Conference in Brussels, Belgium.
Key figures
Mathias Dewatripont is a prominent Belgian economist and a professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He is known for his work in contract theory, organisational economics, and banking regulation. His research has been influential in understanding the design of incentive structures and the regulation of financial institutions. He was a founding member, Fellow and Board Member of ECGI when it was first established.
Marco Becht
Marco Becht is a prominent economist and finance scholar. He is known for his expertise in corporate governance, finance, and law and economics. He has contributed significantly to the understanding of corporate governance structures and practices around the world. He is a founding member, Fellow and Board member of ECGI. He has been the Executive Director of ECGI since 2002.
Léo Goldschmidt (1932-2022) was a corporate governance visionary, mentor, and philanthropist. His extensive contributions to corporate governance and education left a lasting legacy. His work, particularly through the Chair he established at Solvay Brussels School and his involvement with ECGI, ICGN and GCGC, continues to inspire and shape the domains of corporate governance and responsible leadership worldwide.
About ECARES and SBS-EM
The European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES)
ECARES is a research center at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) with a broad objective to foster excellence in research and high-quality graduate education in economics, econometrics and statistics. It began in 1991 as a joint initiative of the Institut d’Etudes européennes (IEE) at the ULB, and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). In 1999, it merged with the Centre d’Economie Mathématique et d’Econométrie (CEME) and the collaboration with statisticians from Institut de Statistique et de Recherche Opérationnelle (ISRO).
ECARES fellows are leading researchers in a number of fields, including the behavior and organization of firms and markets, international trade, political economy, theory and empirics of household behavior, theory and applications of econometrics, development of nonparametric and robust statistical methods.
ECARES and ECGTN
ECARES was a training partner of the European Corporate Governance Training Network (ECGTN) between 2004 - 2009. ECGTN was a project to reduce the European research and training gap in corporate governance by bringing together Europe's leading academics and institutions from law, economics, finance, political economy and management to train doctoral students in conducting world class research in this area.
Simone Hirschvogl (ECARES Université Libre de Bruxelles) talks about her experience as part of the ECGTN (2004-2009).
Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (SBS-EM)
The Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (SBS-EM) was created in 1903 by Ernest Solvay, a well-known humanist and captain of industry. Today, the School is proud to be part of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), which now has among its faculties a high-quality faculty dedicated to Economics and Management.
SBS-EM honours the main goals set by its founders, namely: training leaders who aspire to the ‘Homo Universalis’ ideal, highlighting through its programmes the necessity of having a multi disciplinary perspective, and focusing on a quantitative and scientific approaches.
The School also shares common values with ULB and ECGI, especially the principle of free inquiry, an approach based on critical thinking, and a focus on research.
The Goldschmidt Chair on Corporate Governance
In 1999, Léo Goldschmidt's donation to the Solvay Brussels School established a Chair on Corporate Governance, fostering an advanced understanding of corporate organisations.
Evolving from a visiting to a full-time chair in 2010, the Goldschmidt Chair, under Professor Marco Becht, has significantly influenced corporate governance education and research. In 2002, Léo Goldschmidt, Mathias Dewatripont, and Marco Becht were among the founding members of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). Prof. Becht became Executive Director of ECGI, a position he still holds today. From their home base at the Solvay Business School, they worked closely with the ECGI members for two decades to convene meetings, deliver projects, and to establish an institute renowned for its leading research from around the world. They established the European Corporate Governance Research Foundation (ECGRF) in 2013, and then a permanent home for ECGI at the Palace of the Academies in Brussels, where it is hosted by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB). In 2015 they launched the Global Corporate Governance Colloquia (GCGC), an annual research conference, with the inaugural event at Stanford Law School.
Across these three decades, the concept of corporate governance itself has evolved considerably. Once focused on corporate control, takeovers, market transparency, and company law in developed countries, by the late 2000’s, academic research had set its crosshairs on the banking crisis and the improvements or learnings could be gleaned from research on the period. By 2013, “investor stewardship” was added to the field and gained increasing traction several years later as institutional investors took dominant market positions.
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) also emerged as a new topic in the late 2000’s and has developed into a significant aspect of modern corporate governance. Once a peripheral field of research, it has taken centre stage. To reflect this development a course on “Responsible Capitalism” was added to the Chair’s portfolio.
Léo Goldschmidt’s legacy in helping to educate more than 2,000 students who have taken courses with his eponymous chair, along with his efforts to grow the ECGI network which paid tribute to him in 2017 at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, are never to be forgotten. Research co-funded by the Chair won the 2023 Award for Outstanding Research from PRI, the UN supported organisation promoting responsible investment.
