The first proposal for a special institute in quantitative economics at the Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam was made by Henri Theil in 1953 with support of Jan Tinbergen, while working at the Central Planning Bureau.
The senate of the school added the requirement that it "would not confine itself to economic applications, but would also give attention to business problems, which implied that operations research had to be included in the program.
"[3] In the year 1955–56 Theil was Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, where he made a similar proposal again with support of Jan Tinbergen.
In the early years the Institute developed a full academic program in Econometrics.
The program originally focussed on "national and international macroeconomic policy; the required computing power to estimate econometric models was expensive and scarcely available, so that econometrics was almost exclusively applied in public (statistical) agencies.