University Library News
Georgia State University

Meet CEAR's Inaugural Director

In the fall of 2009, Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business opened it’s new Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk (CEAR) and named Professor Glenn W. Harrison, C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management and Insurance, as it’s first director.  CEAR is based in Robinson’s Risk Management and Insurance Department, but was created in conjunction with Robinson’s Departments of Finance and Accounting, the Economics Department of Georgia State’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

CEAR was created to develop an interdisciplinary approach to risk management, drawing from fields such as economics, finance, accounting, risk management and insurance, engineering, operations research, psychology, and public health.  “Risk often is studied in one dimension,” Harrison said in a Robinson College of Business news release. ” We want to bring the best risk researchers around the globe together to solve real-world problems and look at ways to quantify things like systemic risk.”

Harrison earned an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree in Economics from Monash University in Melbourne Australia and an MA and PhD in Economics from UCLA. He is the author of over 140 scholarly publications on the topics of Risk and Uncertainty, Experimental Economics, and Econometrics. As a consultant he has worked for many government and private agencies including the World Bank, the Swedish Government and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

If you are interested in reading some of his work, the Georgia State University Library owns several of his publications. Here’s a short list:

  • “Risk Aversion in Game Shows,” (with Steffen Andersen, Morten Lau and Elisabet Rutström) in J.C. Cox and G.W. Harrison (eds.), Risk Aversion in Experiments (Bingley, UK: Emerald, Research in Experimental Economics, Volume 12, 2008).