Lans Bovenberg

Lans Bovenberg obtained his Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of California, Berkeley. He started his working career as an Economist at the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C (1985-1990), after which he worked at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Hague. He was Deputy Director of CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (Centraal Planbureau) and became a Professor of Economics at Tilburg University in 1998, where he served as Scientific Director of the Center for economic research (CentER). In 2004, he won the Spinoza prize -- the second Dutch social scientist ever to win this prize. With the prize money, he founded the research network Netspar (Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement) in which various pension funds, insurance companies, public agencies and universities participate. He is currently scientific director of Netspar. Lans Bovenberg has published extensively in the leading international journals on a wide variety of topics: public economics, tax policy, environmental economics, institutional economics, pensions and aging, international macroeconomics and labour economics. He is one of the most-cited Dutch economists in the international academic literature. At the same time, he has been the most-cited Dutch economist in policy-oriented journals aimed at practitioners and policymakers for about one and a half decades now. He is an independent member of the Social Economic Council (SER), which is the main advisory body on social-economic policy of the Dutch government.