CETE is a research centre of the Faculty of Economics of Porto. Its main purposes are the promotion of scientific research and of advanced training in its specific research fields. Applied research is also considered as a means of fostering co-operation between the university and the community at large.

The centre congregates research with a common interest in applied research particularly in the fields of labour economics, industrial organisation, agricultural economics, the economics of tourism and corporate finance.

Research in labour economics is clustered around three major topics. The first takes a demand-side approach to study the structure of labour adjustment costs, the dynamics of wages and the labour market consequences of job security policies. Over and undereducation and their impact on wages is the second research topic in the field of labour economics. It aims at analysing the gap between schooling levels on offer and those demanded by employers to fill existing and opening vacancies. Both these topics are addressed using large longitudinal datasets made available to CETE researchers by the Department of Statistics of the Ministry of Labour. The third line of research analyses the labour market consequences of employment public policies, especially in terms of the gender dimension of participation and the changes of the European social model.

In the field of industrial organisation research has been clustering around issues such as market power, strategic commercial policy, vertical differentiation, mixed oligopolies and economic regulation. Research in the economics of tourism is also actively pursued especially through the modelisation of the demand of tourism.

In the area of agricultural economics, the research projects have been focusing on the microeconomic analysis of productive efficiency and productivity growth as well as on the decomposition of productivity growth into a scale effect, an efficiency change effect and a technological change effect. All the efficiency and productivity growth measures are estimated using the generalised maximum entropy formalism.

For CETE, the area of Corporate Finance is a new but fast-developing one. The potential for growth exists due to the availability of Datastream, a large dataset with financial and accounting data, which opens up the way to empirical research in this field, but also due to very promising theoretical developments at the frontier between Industrial Organisation and Corporate Finance.

CETE has also been actively sponsoring advanced courses in microeconomics offered as part of the Masters and Doctoral Programmes at the Faculty of Economics of Porto. A number of foreign researchers visited the Faculty upon being invited by CETE.