Former PhD candidate Jens Klooster of Erasmus School of Economics, has been awarded the Willem R. van Zwet Award. Each year, the award is bestowed to the best PhD thesis in statistics or operations research obtained at a Dutch university. The annual contest is organised by the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research (VVSOR).
Jens Klooster, who has continued his career as an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, is an econometrician with primary research interests in econometric and statistical theory. His research applies methods from the field of robust statistics to study and develop outlier-robust procedures for reliable statistical inference, with a particular focus on instrumental variable models.
Jens obtained a double master’s degree in Stochastics and Financial Mathematics and Economics at the University of Amsterdam before he started as a PhD candidate in the department of Econometrics Erasmus School of Economics under the supervision of Chen Zhou and Mikhail Zhelonkin.
Klooster receives the Willem R. van Zwet Award for his pioneering research on the development of new statistical testing procedures that are robust to weak instruments and outliers, two common challenges in empirical economics. By revisiting several influential empirical studies, he shows how these tests can be applied in practice and, in some cases, lead to different empirical conclusions.
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For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, +31 653 641 846.
