Olympia Bover Hidiroglu, new President of the Catalan Statistics Council

Yesterday, 16 December 2025, the Government of Catalonia approved the appointment of Olympia Bover Hidiroglu as the new President of the Catalan Statistics Council. Bover replaces Guadalupe Gómez Melis, who held the position from 2019 to 2025.

Olympia Bover Hidiroglu (Barcelona, 1958) holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics (1987), an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the same university (1983) and a degree in Economics from the University of Barcelona (1981). Bover is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Monetary and Financial Studies and a former economist at the Bank of Spain, where she was Director of the Department of Structural Analysis and Microeconomic Studies (2018-2024), Head of the Division of Microeconomic Analysis (2015-2018) and Head of the Unit of Microeconomic Information and Analysis (2005-2015). Before joining the Bank of Spain, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Nuffield College, Oxford (1985-1989) and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics (1989-1991).

She is an International Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, a fellow of the European Economic Association and a former chair of the Spanish Economic Association (AEE).

Bover has researched housing and labour markets, household finance and consumer behaviour. She has contributed new methodologies in panel data econometrics which have had a major impact on how these data are analysed. The methodology she developed to produce a new household wealth survey in Spain has enabled numerous research projects, inspired similar surveys in other countries and revealed key information about the distribution of wealth in Spain.

Her work has been cited more than 30,000 times on Google Scholar. She is one of the top 10 economists in Spain and the top 25 women economists worldwide according to the RePEc ranking. In 2023, she received the Rei Jaume I Prize for Economics.