Policy brief

Safe and Sound: an EU approach to Sovereign Investment

Publishing date
07 November 2008

This Policy Brief looks at how the EU should react to the changing patterns of inward foreign investment, including a recent rise in investment coming from countries with diverse, often non-democratic political regimes. Lars-Henrik Röller and Nicolas Véron advocate building an EU-level policy framework for the review of the security consequences of foreign acquisitions, the implementation of which would be carried out at national level.

About the authors

  • Nicolas Véron

    Nicolas Véron is a senior fellow at Bruegel and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. His research is mostly about financial systems and financial reform around the world, including global financial regulatory initiatives and current developments in the European Union. He was a cofounder of Bruegel starting in 2002, initially focusing on Bruegel’s design, operational start-up and development, then on policy research since 2006-07. He joined the Peterson Institute in 2009 and divides his time between the US and Europe.

    Véron has authored or co-authored numerous policy papers that include banking supervision and crisis management, financial reporting, the Eurozone policy framework, and economic nationalism. He has testified repeatedly in front of committees of the European Parliament, national parliaments in several EU member states, and US Congress. His publications also include Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, a book on accounting standards and practices (Cornell University Press, 2006), and several books in French.

    His prior experience includes working for Saint-Gobain in Berlin and Rothschilds in Paris in the early 1990s; economic aide to the Prefect in Lille (1995-97); corporate adviser to France’s Labour Minister (1997-2000); and chief financial officer of MultiMania / Lycos France, a publicly-listed online media company (2000-2002). From 2002 to 2009 he also operated an independent Paris-based financial consultancy.

    Véron is a board member of the derivatives arm (Global Trade Repository) of the Depositary Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a financial infrastructure company that operates globally on a not-for-profit basis. 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 is trilingual in English, French and Spanish, and has fluent understanding of German and Italian.

    In September 2012, Bloomberg Markets included Véron in its second annual 50 Most Influential list with reference to his early advocacy of European banking union.

     

  • Lars-Hendrik Röller

    Since July 1, 2011, Lars-Hendrik Röller has been appointed Director General of the Economic and Financial Policy Division of the German Federal Chancellery. Previous to becoming a member of Bruegel’s board Roller contributed to Bruegel’s research as a non-resident fellow, a position he held from 2006 to 2010.

    Lars-Hendrik Röller was appointed President of ESMT European School of Management and Technology on September 1, 2006. Since 2007 he has been a Research Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB).

    In 2003 Lars-Hendrik Röller was appointed Europe’s first Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission, a position he held until 2006. He is the President of the German Economic Association and international Affiliate at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London. From 2005 - 2007 he was President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE).

    Lars-Hendrik Röller is a Fellow of the European Economic Association and a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. In 2002 he was awarded the Gossen Prize (to honor a German economist whose work has gained international reputation).

    Lars-Hendrik Röller is on the editorial board of the several leading international journals and has published extensively in the area of competition, technology and market structure.  He has consulted international companies, governments and international organizations on issues of competition, strategy and regulation. He is co-founder and senior advisor of ESMT Competition Analysis, a consultancy working exclusively on economic assessments in the field of antitrust and regulatory.

    Lars-Hendrik Röller holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an M.A. degree in Economics and an M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.

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