Bart Cockx
Introduction
Bart Cockx obtained his PhD at the KULeuven. In 1993 he was appointed as assistant lecturer at the UCLouvain, university at which he was promoted to full professor in 2007. In 2008 he became a research professor at the Department of Economics at Ghent University, where he teaches “advanced econometrics: nonlinear methods” to master and doctoral students, and “Causal Inference in Microeconometrics with Applications to Program Evaluation” to doctoral students of Belgian universities. He is also associated to the following research institutes: IZA in Bonn, CESifo in Munich, IRES (Université catholique de Louvain) and ROA (Maastricht University). As a member of the scientific council of the “Plan d’Investissements dans les Compétences” (PIC), a 15 billion € plan of the French government that aims at strengthening competences of long-term unemployed and youth in France through training between 2018 and 2022, he provides advice regarding the evaluation of these training programmes.
Research
His major research interests are labour economics and micro-econometrics. He is specialized in the evaluation of labour market policy and micro-econometric evaluation methods. More recently, his research interests have been widened to the estimation of structural behavioural models aiming at directly estimating the underlying parameters of theoretical economic models of individual behaviour, such as job search, and at using these models for policy advice. He has a particular interest in the estimation of models that incorporate the recent insights of behavioural economics, such as those regarding biased expectations and procrastination. He has also recently started up research that applies machine learning techniques in “big data” for the identification of heterogeneous causal impacts of labour market programmes.
Publications
Personal homepage