ERIM Professor Mathijs van Dijk Awarded Prestigious NIAS Fellowship

Prof. dr. Peter Roosenboom, Department Chair, RSM Finance explains, “Each year, NIAS invites around 50 carefully selected scholars, both from within and outside the Netherlands to its centre in Wassenaar. Mathijs will be a Fellow in Residence at NIAS from September 2015 till June 2016 to work on his project, The Social Value of Finance. Please join me in congratulating Mathijs for this outstanding achievement.”

In his inaugural address of the same title, Professor van Dijk reflects on the value for society of finance as an academic field claiming “the social value of finance as an academic field could be greater if we were more focused on broader questions, more open-minded about other fields and methodologies, and more modest about the extent of our knowledge.”

He presents a new research agenda designed to follow up on these aspirations in which he proposes three projects to further research “The value for society of finance in the sense of a financial system (that is, the social value of banks and financial markets).”

Professor van Dijk’s NIAS fellowship research will directly investigate the extent to which financial systems in different countries around the world fulfill their key societal functions, such as (1) allocating capital to its most productive uses and (2) helping households to cope with income shocks and plan their consumption through saving and borrowing.  As he says, “The ultimate aim of my research is to aid policy makers in both developed and developing countries to make better decisions about financial system architecture.”

Mathijs van Dijk is Professor of Financial Markets, endowed by the Erasmus Trust Fund, at the Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University (RSM. He obtained his B.Sc./M.Sc. in Econometrics (cum laude) from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1996. He went on to earn a PhD in Finance from Maastricht University in 2002. ). He also studied at Warwick Business School and at Princeton University and was affiliated with Ohio State University, Duke University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting research scholar. He has been affiliated with ERIM since 2002. His research on the liquidity of and the price-formation process on financial markets and on the cost of capital for companies has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Accounting & Economics, the Review of Finance and the Financial Analysts Journal. In 2008, he received a “Vidi” grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to carry out a five-year research project on liquidity crises in international financial markets.