Wim P. Vijverberg

Wim P. Vijverberg (born in Naaldwijk, Netherlands, 1955) is a Professor of Economics at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and a Research Fellow at IZA Institute of Labor Economics. He was born to a greenhouse farmer in Holland. He was the fourth child in a family of six children.
== Education ==
Wim studied Econometrics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and completed his BA in 1975, came to Pittsburgh as a PhD student in 1977, and earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. His Ph.D. dissertation title was “Labor supply and fertility decisions: A dynamic model of the economic behavior of married women”. Due to his research about the female labor supply, he received an offer from Yale University to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow under Professor T. Paul Schultz at the Economics Growth Center from 1981 to 1984.
== Academic Career ==
In 1984, he went to the University of Hawai'i as a Visiting Assistant Professor; he then spent another year at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. In 1986, he took joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991 and Professor in 1997. In 2008, he accepted an offer from the City University of New York Graduate Center and moved to New York City. He was the Executive Officer—similar to a department chair or a dean—of the Ph.D. Program in Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center from 2015 to 2019.
== Research ==
Wim Vijverberg is an applied econometrician. Most of his applied research works are related to labor economics and development economics. He has published more than fifty journal articles in top-ranked general economics and specialized journals. One of his most notable articles, published in the Journal of Political Economy, evaluates whether nature or nurture has a dominant impact on child development in the context of family background and schooling, while his most cited papers are related to the impact of education on entrepreneurship selection and performance—published in Journal of Economic Surveys and the World Bank Economic Review. 
In addition to working in academia, he also did consultant work for the World Bank and some private firms. In 1985-1991, he worked on wages, self-employment, family enterprises, and migration with data from the Living Standards Measurement Study of the World Bank in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Peru. In 1994, he visited Moldova on behalf of the World Bank to review the household budget survey that was conducted on an ongoing basis by the Ministry of Statistics of Moldova. In 1995-2006, he studied entrepreneurship and household enterprises in Vietnam, using the World Bank data from the Vietnam Living Standards Survey. He visited Hanoi of Vietnam several times, working with the Vietnamese survey administrators to improve the survey design. In 2001-2010, he assisted the World Bank in designing the Rural Investment Climate Survey through the formulation of its methodology, the drawing up of the prototypical questionnaire, and the evaluation of pilot surveys in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Nicaragua. The project was published in two books: “The Rural Investment Climate: It Matters and It Differs” in 2006 and “The Rural Investment Climate: Analysis and Findings” in 2008. 
Since 2008, his research was about applying the Generalized Tukey Lambda (GTL) distribution in a discrete choice model —used, for example, to study the outcome of mortgage loan application—and in a financial risk measurement model. His current research is to, first, evaluate different techniques of filtering the strong cross-sectional dependence in the Foreign_exchange_option|FX option Volatility_smile|volatility surface, second, incorporate the spatial econometric element into the FX option volatility surface, and third, appraise the forecasting ability of these newly generated models.
== Teaching and Mentorship ==
Currently, Wim is teaching Econometrics II, Applied Micro-econometrics, Panel Econometrics, Spatial Econometrics at the Ph.D. Program in Economics at CUNY Graduate Center. Wim has supervised 40 Ph.D. dissertation students, including 7 co-supervised, and has been a dissertation committee member of 61 Ph.D. students. Graduated students have found employment in various place, in both academic and non-academic jobs, domestic and abroad. 
 
== Personal Life ==
Wim Vijverberg is married to Chu-Ping Vijverberg, Professor of Economics at the CUNY College of Staten Island.
Category:1955 births
Category:People from Naaldwijk
Category:Professorships in economics
Category:Economics educators