Fundraising

Throughout my career, I have been deeply involved in fundraising. My activities in this area can be divided into two parts, namely funding obtained for either (A) the establishment of new research centres or (B) specific research initiatives, such as PhD projects, major conferences etc.

In the early days of my career, I was co-founder of the Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), together with Søren Bo Nielsen and Peter Birch Sørensen. I still remember how we - not least influenced by the intake of several glasses of red wine - played around with letters in order to form an idiomatic name, and based on Søren's suggestion we agreed on the acronym EPRU...

After a short spell as a civil servant within the Danish central administration, I decided to return to academia. Instead of taking a university position, I managed to pool enough financial resources to build an in-house research unit within the Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs. The unit was attractively located in the Dahlerup warehouse close to the Langelinie quay in the harbour of Copenhagen.

Under my leadership, the unit grew, not least through the hiring of a number of young scholars, and the unit's output became more and more "academic", with some papers ending up in top economics and finance journals. Not least for that reason, a decision was taken to move the unit to CBS as an independent research centre, now named Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR). 

More recently, I have been co-founder of the Pension Research Centre (PeRCent), established in 2015 and financed by grants from Danish pension funds and CBS co-funding. The purpose of PeRCent is to better understand and help finding solutions to key challenges faced by the Danish pension system in a broad sense.

Ideally, PeRCent seeks to build a number of bridges, namely between: (1) theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented research; (2) economics and finance; (3) CBS and the pension industry in Denmark; and (4) Denmark and the rest of the world. I thoroughly enjoy working together with the Danish pension funds - but I always remind myself: Keep arm’s length – and hold high standards...

Over the years, I have also been able to raise funds for a large number of more targeted research projects. Most of them have involved specific PhD projects. Recently, I have, through my affiliation with Bruegel, helped secure funding at the order of EUR 3bn for the project "The Care Wave and the Future of the Baby Boomers and Their Children", which is part of the EU programme "Horizon Europe".

More details of the various projects can be found in the above menu.