Advisory Committee

Glenn Harrison

Glenn Harrison is the C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management & Insurance and Director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk, in the Department of Risk Management & Insurance, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. He has over 150 academic publications, and his current research interests include risk and uncertainty, experimental economics, econometrics, risk management, development economics, and the economics of the first world poor. Professor Harrison has also been a consultant for numerous government agencies and private bodies. Professor Harrison is a Pisces, and loves red wine, one Swedish woman, and one American daughter. Before academic life, Professor Harrison played Australian “no-rules” football for Hawthorn in the Australian Football League, kicking one goal in his career. His e-mail is gharrison@gsu.edu.

Markus Frölich

Markus Frölich is Professor of Econometrics at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics (JBES) and Co-Editor of Labour Economics. He obtained his Ph.D. on Programme/Policy Evaluation from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, in 2002. His main research area is econometric impact evaluation, with a particular focus on labour markets in developing countries. His research includes vulnerability and poverty with several projects on microinsurance in the Philippines and several other countries, examining for example the interdependencies between formal and informal insurance.

Robert Lensink

Robert Lensink is Professor in Finance and Financial Markets at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen and Professor of Finance and Development in the Development Economics Group, Wageningen University. Professor Lensink is an expert on development finance, especially in the context of microfinance. He has published widely in international journals, among which the Economic Journal, American Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics and World Development. He has also organised several international microfinance conferences, such as recently the Second European Research Conference on Microfinance.

Anne van der Veen

Anne van der Veen (1951) studied econometrics at the University of Groningen (RUG). His first affiliation was at the Environmental Research Centre of the RUG, working on an economic-environmental modelling project. In 1978 he became Assistant Professor with the Department of Economics at the RUG, where he taught Regional Economics. He obtained his PhD at the University of Tilburg on the subject of “Migration, commuting and labour force participation: macro- and micro-economic approaches”. From 1984 to 1987 Anne van der Veen was Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the RUG and taught Public Finance.

In 1987 he joined the University of Twente, Faculty of Public Administration and Public Policy, department of Economics as an Associate Professor. Since 1999 Dr. van der Veen has a professorship with the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Twente, in Spatial Economics. Moreover, since 2007 he has a professorship in Governance and Spatial Integrated Assessment at the Faculty of ITC, the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

Haroon Bhorat

Haroon Bhorat is Professor of Economics, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is also the Director of the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU). He has his PhD in Economics through Stellenbosch University in South Africa. His research interests cover the areas of labour economics, poverty and income distribution and is the current recipient of a highly prestigious national Research Chair under the theme of Economic Growth, Poverty and Inequality: Exploring the Interactions for South Africa.
He has co-authored two books on labour market and poverty issues in South Africa, and has published widely in academic journals. He has undertaken extensive work for numerous South African government departments, most notably the South African Department of Labour, the Presidency and the National Treasury. He has served on a number of government research advisory panels and consults regularly with international organizations such as the ILO, World Bank and the UNDP.

Haroon Bhorat is the Minister of Labour’s appointee on the Employment Conditions Commission (ECC) – the country’s minimum wage setting body. Professor Bhorat served as economic advisors to Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe, formally serving on the Presidential Economic Advisory Panel. He is currently on the Economic Advisory Panel for the Minister of Economic Development and serves an advisor to the Minister of Finance.

Hans Jürgen Rösner

Prof. Dr. Hans Juergen Roesner (born 1947) is Associate Professor for Social Policy, Health Economics and Cooperative Studies at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne (since 1992). Related to Micro Finance, together with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Micro Insurance Academy in Delhi and other Indian partners, he has directed two EU-financed collaborative projects concerning community based health insurance (CBHI) from 2005 to 2007 and from 2009 onwards (FP7-HEALTH-2007-B) as well as the likewise EU-financed EduLink Project on micro health insurance in Ghana, Botswana and Malawi from 2006 to 2008.

Shawn Cole

Shawn Cole, an associate professor of finance at Harvard Business School, has been evaluating weather-index micro-insurance in India since 2006. He is actively involved in two large-scale projects, one in Gujarat, and one in Andhra Pradesh, in collaboration with SEWA and BASIX, respectively. He has several papers on micro-insurance, a an HBS case study on BASIX, and led a forthcoming DFID-sponsored systematic review of the index insurance literature.

Xavier Giné

XAVIER GINE is a Senior Economist in the research department of the World Bank. He is currently a BREAD affiliate and Associate Editor for the Journal of Development Economics. Since joining the World Bank as a Young Economist in 2002, his research has focused on access to financial services and rural financial markets. In recent papers he investigated the macroeconomic effects of a credit liberalization; the relationship between formal and informal sources of credit in rural credit markets; indigenous interlinked credit contracts in the fishing industry and the impact of microfinance services such as business training and financial literacy, microinsurance and microsavings. Prior to joining the Bank he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Susan Steiner

Susan Steiner is a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin. She received her PhD from the University of Leipzig and worked as a researcher at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and the University of Manchester. While at GIGA, Susan, together with her colleague Lena Giesbert, conducted a research project on the uptake of micro life insurance in Ghana which was funded by the DZ Bank Foundation. A paper on the inter-relation of the use of different microfinancial services, which resulted from this project, was published in the Journal of Risk and Insurance. Another paper on the people's perception of microinsurance is forthcoming as a GIGA Working Paper.

Andreas Landmann

Andreas Landmann received training in development economics / applied econometrics at the University of Toronto (Canada) and at University of Mannheim (Germany), where he is also pursuing a PhD in Economics. He focusses on Microinsurance, alternative means of risk-sharing within social networks, and potential interactions between the two. Mr. Landmann conducted a behavioral experiment on the Philippines, but uses econometric evaluation methods as well. He for example analyzes houshold data on Microinsurance from Pakistan.

Daniel Clarke

Daniel Clarke's research is on financial contracting in developing countries, with strong links to development economics, decision under uncertainty, financial theory and actuarial science.  He teaches actuarial science and the economics of microfinance at the University of Oxford, and works with the World Bank's Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program and IFPRI's Markets,Trade and Institutions Division.  Daniel is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Aaltje de Roos