The appointment was made in consultation with the Works Council of the faculty and the Faculty Student Council.

‘Roel Beetsma is a strategic thinker, a highly experienced administrator and an outstanding scientist,’ says Geert ten Dam, president of the Executive Board and chair of the Appointments Committee. ‘As chair of the Amsterdam School of Economics and vice-dean, he has been partly responsible for the successful trajectory taken by the faculty in recent years. Within that context, time and again he has been able to forge new connections between people, education, research and society at large. We look forward to working with him.’

‘The Faculty of Economics and Business has made tremendous progress on all fronts in recent years,’ says Beetsma. ‘My objective is to further shape this development. This involves further strengthening the research taking place into socially relevant themes, the ongoing modernisation of our teaching with maximum use of the technological advancements available, the further development of our valorisation activities, and broadening and deepening our internationalisation. At the same time, we will be intensifying our ties with the City of Amsterdam. All of this will be done by enabling the Amsterdam Business School, the Amsterdam School of Economics and our support and management staff to operate as a single team in the best possible working environment and by getting get the most out of each other’s strengths.’

About Roel Beetsma

Prof. R.M.J.W (Roel) Beetsma has been a professor at the UvA since 1999. In addition, he has been the chair of the Amsterdam School of Economics and vice-dean of the Faculty of Economics since 2012. Beetsma also holds various advisory and expert positions outside the university. He is a member of the European Fiscal Board (EFB) of the European Commission, an advisory council that advises on the monitoring of the budgetary policies of EU Member States; a member of the scientific expert group that advises the ABP pension fund on corporate social responsibility; and a member of the Advisory Board of the Stichting Economisch Onderzoek (SEO). In addition, Beetsma previously chaired the Dutch European Economy Expert Group (Commissie Europese economie), which was instructed by the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs to advise the Dutch government on its stance with respect to EU economic and financial policies so as to make the EU economy more stable and resilient. He was also previously a member of the Goudswaard Commission, which was instructed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment to review the future viability of supplementary pension schemes. Beetsma also holds several supervisory ancillary positions. He is a member of the Supervisory Board of ASR Vermogensbeheer N.V. and is a member of the Supervisory Board of Stichting Pensioenfonds Detailhandel.

In terms of his teaching and research, Beetsma focuses on macroeconomics, international economics, public economics and pension economics. His research has been widely published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature and The Economic Journal. Over the past year, Beetsma held a visiting professorship at the Copenhagen Business School and has previously held visiting research positions at DELTA (Paris), the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), the University of California in Berkeley and the EUI Florence. Beetsma is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London, the CESifo network in Munich, the Kiel Institute of World Economics, the Tinbergen Institute and the Netspar knowledge network. He studied Econometrics at Tilburg University and obtained his doctorate at the Center for Economic Research at that university.