PSE is a brainchild of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, where the students are enrolled primarily), the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Ponts, and it is physically located on the ENS campus of Jourdan in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. It was founded in 2006 as a coalition of universities and grandes écoles to unify high-level research in economics across French academia, and was first presided by economist Thomas Piketty. Since its foundation it has gained a certain amount of academic weight, and according to a ranking released by project RePEc in January 2016, it was ranked as the seventh-best university-level economics department in the world.