Jean-Pierre Danthine is a Distinguished Research Scholar at IMD, Professor at EPFL, and Professor Emeritus at UNIL. He is Director of the Enterprise for Society Center, a joint venture of UNIL-HEC, IMD and EPFL, and a member of the Board of the Fondation Leenaards and Fondation Schlumberger pour l’éducation et la recherche.
Danthine was President of the Paris School of Economics from September 2015 to July 2021 and member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London from 2015 to 2021.
He was a member of the governing board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and its Vice-Chairman until 2015. From 2010 to 2012, he was heading the third department of the bank in charge of financial markets, banking operations, and information technology. In 2012, he became head of the second department in charge of financial stability, cash, finance, and risk.
We academics have a duty to help society more forcefully address the sustainability challenge we are confronted with: the necessity to transition towards a resilient, inclusive economy respectful of the planetary boundaries. This is the mission of Enterprise for Society (E4S), the joint initiative of UNIL, IMD and EPFL.
Danthine earned a master’s degree in economics at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and a PhD in economics at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From 1975 to 1979, he was Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, at Columbia University, New York. He then joined the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was Professor of Macroeconomics and Finance from 1980 to 2009. During this period, he was also a visiting professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Université Laval, Québec, as well as the universities of Aix-Marseille, Toulon, and Dijon.
Danthine is a Fellow of the European Economic Association and a member of the Academia Europaea. He was Managing Director of the Swiss Finance Institute from 2006 to 2009. Previously, he was the Director of the International Center for Financial Asset Management and Engineering, Lausanne and Geneva, Vice-Rector of the University of Lausanne, Chairman of its Département d’économétrie et d’économie politique (DEEP) and Director of its Institute of Banking and Financial Management, now the Institute of Banking and Finance.
He was also a member of the Executive Committee of CEPR, of the Macroeconomic Policy Group of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels, and of the Scientific Council of the European Science Foundation Network in Financial Markets. During his time at the SNB, he was also the Chairman of the Foundation Council of the SNB’s Study Center Gerzensee, a member of the Supervisory Council of the Geneva Finance Research Institute at the University of Geneva, of the Institute of Banking and Finance at the University of Zurich and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Journal of Central Banking.
Danthine has published numerous academic papers in leading international journals and was Associate Editor of the European Economic Review, the Journal of Empirical Finance, Revue Finance, Finance Research Letters and Macroeconomic Dynamics. He is a co-author (with Professor JD Donaldson) of Intermediate Financial Theory and multiple monographs in macroeconomics and finance.
