Eleni Papadimitriou

Eleni Papadimitriou is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Dynamic Uncertainty, where her work applies optimal control theory to problems in monetary policy and central banking. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Athens University of Economics and Business (Department of Economics), where her doctoral research formulated the central bank's interest rate setting problem as a continuous-time stochastic optimal control problem and derived the corresponding Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. Her thesis established conditions for the existence of smooth value functions under standard loss functionals, and characterised the optimal rate path in terms of the state-dependent solution to the HJB equation under inflation and output gap uncertainty.

Following her doctorate, Papadimitriou extended her work to settings in which the central bank faces Knightian uncertainty — situations where the true model governing inflation dynamics is not known and the policymaker must choose a policy that performs acceptably across a set of plausible models rather than optimising against a single one. Her research in this period produced minimax formulations of the monetary policy problem and derived robust optimal policies as solutions to a related two-player zero-sum control game, establishing connections between robust control theory and the differential game literature.

At IADU, she applies these frameworks to central bank policy design, sovereign reserve management, and currency stabilisation problems — settings in which a state institution must solve a dynamic optimisation under uncertainty with binding constraints, and where the solution has direct operational implications. Her work supports the Institute's capacity to provide rigorously founded policy analysis to central banks and sovereign debt management offices.