News of Center for Operations Research and Econometrics

JOB - PhD position in Energy Economics

Center for Operations Research and Econometrics — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:38:46 +0200

Design of auction-based support schemes for renewable energy in Europe

Scholarship : About €2,400 net/month, tax-exempt

Duration : 24 months, with a possible 24-month extension

Deadline : 21 September 2026 for full consideration

Funding : Fonds Spéciaux de Recherche (FSR), UCLouvain

Start : Autumn 2026, no later than January 2027

Location : Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Research project

This PhD position in Energy Economics focuses on auction-based support schemes for renewable energy in Europe, drawing on auction theory and industrial organization. The exact orientation is flexible: during the first year, the candidate will develop their doctoral research project within this area. Four possible directions are:

De-risking green investment. How should governments de-risk investment in green energy? Does public intervention crowd out private insurance or weaken incentives to develop suitable technologies and produce at the lowest cost?
Multi-technology auction design. How should auctions be designed when different energy technologies compete in the same auction? One objective is to obtain an optimal portfolio of technologies in order to reduce systemic risk and improve European strategic autonomy. Another is to increase competition within the EU and reduce the rents obtained by firms.
Local content requirements. Europe increasingly imposes local content requirements for new investments, implemented through non-price award criteria, which could be studied from a strategic trade perspective.
Pre-qualification requirements and completion bonds. How can pre-qualification requirements and completion bonds reduce project abandonment, stimulate innovation, and improve competition?

Research environment

The project is embedded in the LIDAM Energy Group at CORE. Supported by an ARC grant and an EU Doctoral Network, the group will expand in 2026–27 to five PhD researchers in Energy Economics, five in Operations Research and Engineering, and one postdoctoral researcher.

Doctoral students in economics enroll in the doctoral program in economics at UCLouvain.

Required qualifications

Applicants should have:

A two-year research master’s degree (120 ECTS) in Economics. The degree must have been obtained with distinction.
Alternatively, a master’s degree in another field, complemented by at least one year of graduate-level courses in economics. Equivalent qualifications are assessed under the admission conditions for the PhD in Economics.
Solid graduate-level training in microeconomic theory, including industrial organization, and game theory, at a level comparable to Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, and Osborne and Rubinstein, respectively.
Strong interest in energy economics, market design, and policy-relevant research.
Proficiency in English.

Prior exposure to auction theory, mechanism design, or market design would be considered an advantage.

Employment conditions

The scholarship is governed by UCLouvain’s doctoral-scholarship regulation and the applicable FSR rules. The main conditions are summarized below.

The successful candidate will hold a full-time doctoral scholarship at UCLouvain.
The FSR scholarship initially covers 24 months. During this period, eligible candidates must apply for external doctoral funding from FRS-FNRS. If no external funding is obtained, the supervisor may request a 24-month FSR extension, subject to satisfactory progress.
The scholarship is exempt from income tax. The net amount is currently around 2,400 euros per month, depending on personal circumstances and subject to annual indexation.
The holder is subject to the social security system for salaried employees. Coverage is complete for nationals of the European Economic Area and of states having a social security agreement with Belgium, and limited to health and disability insurance and family allowances for other nationals.
The candidate contributes, to a limited extent, to educational or dissemination activities related to the PhD project.

Application procedure

Applications must be submitted in English as a single PDF file, named: Lastname_Firstname.pdf.

Complete the application form below. After submitting it, you will be given a link for uploading your PDF.

The application PDF should contain:

Statement of intent (max. 1 page), outlining the research you would like to pursue within the project and showing how you meet the required qualifications, including relevant graduate-level coursework in microeconomics, industrial organization, game theory and econometrics
Curriculum vitae (expected Master’s completion date if applicable)
Bachelor’s and Master’s transcripts and degree certificates (if available)
One writing sample (e.g. Master’s thesis or research paper)
Formal language certificates (e.g. TOEFL or IELTS), if available
Standardized test scores (e.g. GRE), if available
Names and contact details of at least two academic referees (letters of recommendation may be requested at a later stage)

Applications received by 21 September 2026 will receive full consideration. Review continues until the position is filled.

Submit your applicatiion

Contact

For more information about this position, please contact:
Bert Willems, LIDAM, UCLouvain. Email: bert.willems@uclouvain.be

CORE DP 2026 / 12

Center for Operations Research and Econometrics — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:57:14 +0200

Faith-Based Platforms / Emmanuelle Auriol, Amma Panin, Eva Raiber, Paul Seabright

> We develop a new model of faith-based organizations (FBOs) as multi-sided platforms. Faithbased platforms (FBPs) offer two types of services. The first is a religious service that includes providing a moral narrative, giving guidance and counselling, and proposing access to the divine through prayer, meditation or rituals. The second is a networking service that allows members to connect with members who come for the religious service. By offering both types of service, FBPs benefit from the spill-over effect of the religious service, which helps to screen for trustworthy network members. FBPs are more profitable than organizations that only offer a religious service, often even per capita, and are generally larger in size. The optimal community size depends on the type of interactions the FBP fosters and how much it invests in the quality of the religious service. This can explain the diversity of FBOs that continue to thrive despite secular competition and some recent phenomena that cannot be fully explained by existing models of FBOs, such as the growth of religion in some urban settings and the emergence of religious communities that have grown very large without sacrificing high profits per member.

CORE DP 2026 / 11

Center for Operations Research and Econometrics — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:40:46 +0200

Long-term care with myopic carers / Justina Klimaviciute, Pierre Pestieau, Jérôme Schoenmaeckers

> This paper analyzes the design of a social policy scheme for long-term care in a setting where disabled elderly individuals receive care both informally, from family members, and formally, from professional providers. We introduce two key features: informal caregivers bear substantial physiological and psychological costs, and they tend to be myopic with respect to these health consequences. Under perfect observability, an optimal policy can induce caregivers to exercise caution and provide an appropriate level of informal care. However, when individual characteristics are not common knowledge, public policy must resort to distortions and indirect instruments to guide agents toward optimal behavior - a classic second-best problem.

CORE DP 2026 / 10

Center for Operations Research and Econometrics — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:19:03 +0200

The Electricity Forward Premium: Renewable Energy Sources and Skewness Preferences / Dongchen He, Ronald Huisman, Bert Willems

> There is mixed empirical evidence on the premiums that explain electricity forward prices. We argue that the growth of electricity supplied by renewable energy sources and the preference for skewness may provide an explanation. We extend an existing equilibrium model by incorporating these features. The model predicts that the influence of spot price variance and skewness on forward prices is undetermined, reconciling mixed empirical findings. Moreover, we find additional premiums related to the covariance and coskewness of renewable supply and spot prices, that explain the forward premium. We provide empirical support using data from the German power market.

CORE DP 2026 / 09

Center for Operations Research and Econometrics — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:23:59 +0200

Shopping Versus Shipping: A Spatial Competition Theory of E-commerce / Toshitaka Gokan, Jacques-François Thisse, Xiwei Zhu

> Online retailers compete not only on price but also on delivery performance, making logistics a central issue in the structure of the retail industry. Online retailers may choose either a uniform delivered price or location-specific delivered prices, whereas offline retailers rely on uniform mill pricing. Using a game-theoretic model that incorporates shopping costs, shipping costs, distaste costs, and consumer taste heterogeneity, we characterize the equilibrium structure of the retail industry. The existence of equilibrium critically depends on the degree of taste heterogeneity. An offline retailer chooses to move online when distaste or shipping costs are sufficiently low. However, firms become trapped in a Prisonerís Dilemma when both adopt uniform delivered pricing. When both firms operate as e-retailers, they engage in a Game of Chicken and soften price competition by adopting di§erent pricing formats. We also describe the evolution of the retail industry from conventional retailing to personalized pricing as distaste and shipping costs decline.