Early on he held positions in research and government in France.[7] Pisani-Ferry joined the European Commission in 1989 as economic adviser to the European Commission,[5] specifically the Director-General of DG ECFIN.[7]
From 1992 to 1997 he was the director of CEPII, a French economics research centre.[5] In 1997, he became senior economic adviser to the French minister of Finance and was later appointed executive president of the French prime minister's Council of Economic Analysis (2001–2002).[5] He served as senior adviser to the director of the French Treasury from 2002 until 2004.[7] In 2005 and until 2013 he was the founding director of the think tank Bruegel in Brussels.[5] He was president of the French economic association from 2006 until 2007.[7]
From December 2011 until May 2012, Pisani-Ferry served as member of the Jacques Delors Institute’s Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa group, a high-level expert group to reflect on the reform of the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union.[8] From 2013 until the end of 2016, he was the Commissioner-General of France Stratégie, which is the French government's ideas lab.[5]
Since October 2017, he holds the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Chair in European Economic and Monetary Integration at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute.[9] He in 2019 co-wrote the book "Global Governance: Demise or Transformation?" with George Papaconstantinou for the Trans European Policy Studies Association.[10] Early in 2017, he was the Director of programme and ideas of Emmanuel Macron's presidential bid in France.[5]
Pisani-Ferry has taught at universities such as Ecole polytechnique in Paris and Université libre de Bruxelles.[7]
Pisani-Ferry has a regular column in Le Monde and Handelsblatt. He has written recently for publications like El Tiempo[11] and Project Syndicate.[12] He spoke at the fifteenth Trento Festival of Economics in May 2020.[13]
