Nicolas Véron

Nicolas Véron is Senior Resident Fellow at Bruegel covering two main areas: financial regulation and supervision, including banking surveillance and accounting / financial reporting policy; and interactions between companies and nations, such as policies to promote or protect “national champions”, regulatory competition among countries, or public screening of foreign direct investment.

He has been involved with the creation and development of Bruegel since its inception in late 2002 and has worked there on a full-time basis since 2005. Since October 2009, he is also a Visiting Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, and divides his time about equally between the United States and Europe.

Véron’s prior experience is in both public policy and corporate finance. In his early career, he worked for the Saint-Gobain Group in Berlin, for Rothschilds in Paris, and as economic aide to the state representative (Préfet) in Lille, France. He then became the corporate adviser to France’s Labour Minister (1997-2000), chief financial officer of MultiMania / Lycos France, a publicly-listed Internet company in Paris (2000-2002), and in 2002 founded ECIF, a tiny financial-services consultancy.

He is the author of Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, a book on accounting standards and practices in a changing financial system (Cornell University Press, 2006); of numerous policy papers at Bruegel alone or with co-authors which include Thomas Philippon, Adam Posen, Lars-Hendrik Röller, and André Sapir; and of several books in French.

In addition to occasional op-eds in newspapers including the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal Europe, his monthly column on business and markets has been published since March 2005 in French by La Tribune, France’s second-leading business daily, and more recently in other languages by leading titles including Forbes Russia, Caijing, Australian Financial Review, and Cinco Dias. He also comments regularly on radio and television channels including the BBC, CNBC, and Bloomberg TV.

Véron is a member of the Corporate Disclosure Policy Council of the CFA Institute and of the Accounting and Auditing Practices Committee of the International Corporate Governance Network. A French citizen born in 1971, he has a quantitative background as a graduate from Ecole Polytechnique (1992) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (1995). He speaks fluent English, French, German and Spanish.