Laura Spierdijk appointed Associate Professor with ius promovendi of The Econometrics of Pensions, Insurance and Finance

Laura Spierdijk was appointed Associate Professor with ius promovendi of The Econometrics of Pensions, Insurance and Finance at the Faculty of Economics and Business on 1 June 2010. Spierdijk specializes in particular in the analysis of the investment policies of institutional investors by means of econometric models. She has conducted research in cooperation with the Dutch ABP pension fund for civil servants into the transaction costs involved in buying and selling shares and developed methods to help pension funds lower these costs.

Laura Spierdijk (Heemstede, 1976) graduated with distinction in both Econometrics and Mathematics at VU University Amsterdam and gained her PhD at Tilburg in 2003 with a thesis on share transactions at the New York Stock Exchange. She discovered that large share transactions have a greater effect on the price of the share in question if they are conducted at times when a lot of trade is going on rather than at quiet times. Institutional investors and traders can use these findings to split up and plan their large transactions in the best possible way. After she gained her PhD, Spierdijk went on to work for the Pensions and Insurance Supervisory Authority of the Netherlands, De Nederlandsche Bank and the University of Twente, until she was appointed as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Econometrics Department of the University of Groningen in 2006.