Welcome to the LIDAM Institute
LIDAM (initially IMMAQ) was founded in 2009 as a research unit which combines fundamental and applied research, relevant in order to target and answer questions as they arise in the public and in the private sector of society – at a regional, national and international scale. More than 200 researchers and consultants, of about 15 different nationalities, contribute to the productivity of this unit. Its common denominator is the use of a coherent set of tools and methods for quantitative modelling and analysis in such diverse fields as actuarial sciences, econometrics, geography, mathematical finance, various areas of economic modelling, game theory, discrete optimisation and operational research, statistics and biostatistics.
As such LIDAM gathers researchers from four different research entities and a consulting platform:
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CORE (Center for Operations Research and Econometrics),
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IRES (Institute for Economic and Social Research),
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ISBA (Institute of Statistics, Biostatistics and Actuarial Sciences)
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LFIN (Louvain Finance)
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SMCS (Statistical Methodology and Computing Service): platform for statistical consulting and continuing education.
These common scientific methodologies triggered also some important synergies on the level of the administrative support of the Institute: our staff members, displaying complementary expertise, started to work together and built a team which can more and more efficiently take care of supporting the ongoing increasing activity within the Institute and its visibility inside and beyond UCLouvain.
A major development is the consulting platform SMCS, which although administratively supported within the Institute is become a service across all disciplines in the three sectors of UCLouvain (science and technology, medical sciences, and humanities). As institutional service to the society we have also the Service of Economic Analysis, that publishes the review Regards Economiques and also the Services d'Analyses Economiques run by IRES.
Today, our research is focused on the following current topics: study of newly emerging energy markets, modeling and control of financial and actuarial risks, extreme events, there form of the pension system, study of economic indicators, such as unemployment and of social inequalities, mobility, well-beeing, analysis of environmental questions, big data, health, statistical modeling and analysis of complex biological systems etc.