Centre for Economic Policy Research

• 1. Introduction

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  The Centre for Economic Policy Research has, since 1983, built a network that now connects more than 2,000 economists across more than 330 institutions in 30 countries. No single university employs them all. No government funds them all. They stay rooted in their own universities, central banks, and research institutes, yet they share a common infrastructure that circulates their work, organises their conferences, and feeds their findings into the rooms where policy is made.

  How did a London-based organisation come to hold together a pan-European research network of that scale? Who founded it, and why? And when Britain left the European Union, what did that mean for an organisation whose identity was bound up with Europe? These are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Richard Portes and the Founding Vision

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  Richard Portes founded CEPR in 1983 with a specific ambition: to raise the quality of economic policy-making in Europe and beyond. That framing mattered. CEPR was not designed as a conventional research institute with tenured staff and a home campus. It was designed as a network organisation, one that would coordinate and amplify the work of economists who already had jobs elsewhere.

  The model was deliberate. By appointing Research Fellows and Affiliates who remain at their own institutions, CEPR could draw on expertise from universities, research institutes, central bank research departments, and international organisations simultaneously. No single institution could replicate that breadth on its own.

  For its first four decades, CEPR operated out of London, which was both a practical base and a symbolic one for a pan-European project. That geography would eventually become a point of tension.

• 3. Brexit and the Paris Move

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  In October 2021, CEPR opened a new office in Paris, one intended to become its head office. The decision followed Britain's departure from the European Union, and CEPR's President Beatrice Weder di Mauro stated plainly why the move was made. CEPR, she said, "is an organisation with a strong European identity and, with Brexit, we felt the need to set ourselves up on the continent."

  The Paris office found its home at Sciences Po, one of several institutions named as Paris Founding Partners. The other partners included the AXA, the Bank of France, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the Ile-de-France Region. That coalition of academic, financial, and governmental backers was itself a statement about how CEPR positioned its work: between research and policy, not confined to either.

  Weder di Mauro had been leading CEPR since 2018, when she succeeded Richard Baldwin, who had served as President from 2014 to 2018.

• 4. The Discussion Paper Engine

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  Before any CEPR research reaches a journal, it typically enters the Discussion Paper series. These papers are circulated widely among specialists in the research and policy communities, with the explicit aim of ensuring findings receive prompt and rigorous professional scrutiny. The Centre produces more than 1,000 Discussion Papers each year.

  The archive now holds more than 20,000 papers. As of December 2025, that series ranked third among all economics working paper series worldwide by total downloads, according to the RePEc database. That ranking places it alongside series maintained by institutions that have existed for far longer than CEPR's four decades.

  The scale of production reflects the network's size. With more than 2,000 economists feeding into a single circulation channel, the Discussion Paper series functions as an early warning system for ideas that may take years to reach formal publication.

• 5. VoxEU and the Policy Audience

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  Richard Baldwin launched VoxEU in June 2007 with the aim of "publishing research-based policy analysis and commentary by economists." Its intended readers were economists in academia, public institutions, and the private sector, alongside journalists and students. The portal publishes short articles, referred to internally as columns, covering macroeconomics, international trade, public finance, labour economics, climate economics, and technological change, among other fields.

  VoxEU has been particularly active during periods of acute economic stress. During the global financial crisis, the euro area crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the portal published commentary directly tied to those events. The format, short and freely accessible, was designed to move faster than academic journals without sacrificing the grounding in research that distinguishes it from ordinary journalism.

  Baldwin served as VoxEU's founding Editor-in-Chief until December 2018. Antonio Fatas assumed the editor-in-chief role in January 2026, the most recent transition in the portal's leadership.

• 6. Annual Publications and the Symposium

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  Since 1999, CEPR has co-published the Geneva Reports on the World Economy as a joint annual project with the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies, an independent foundation associated with the Geneva Graduate Institute. That series gave CEPR a flagship publication format suited to extended, cross-disciplinary analysis.

  In 2022, CEPR launched the Paris Reports, modelled on the Geneva Reports and the Barcelona Reports, with a focus on topics of common European economic interest. The Paris Reports arrived after the organisation had committed to its continental headquarters, reinforcing the shift in institutional gravity.

  The Paris Symposium became CEPR's flagship annual event following the move to Paris. The week-long gathering brings together Research Fellows and Affiliates, associate researchers from the Research and Policy Networks, Distinguished Fellows, and international policymakers. Each Research and Policy Network and Programme area organises part of the programme, while participants can attend sessions across different fields. That open structure means a labour economist and a climate economist may find themselves in the same room, a design choice that shapes the kind of connections the Symposium produces.