About Us
The mission of CEAR is to conduct and promote economic research on the measurement and management of risks faced by individuals, institutions and societies.
The vision of CEAR is that it will establish “risk” as a new academic discipline and become the world’s intellectual leader in the conduct and dissemination of this scholarship. This vision will be realized when it has achieved the following goals:
- Conduct research that informs scholarly and policy debate on the most important and compelling economic and social questions related to risk.
- Be recognized as the leading collaborative research center that enables scholars from around the world to meaningfully interact to address these important topics.
- Foster a critical mass of academics/researchers from multiple disciplines including economics, accounting, finance, law and mathematics who identify themselves as risk scholars.
- Propagate the next generation of risk scholars.
- Become a leading resource for policymakers and business professionals seeking to address challenging risk problems.
CEAR has formal ties with four academic departments at Georgia State University, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Each has a member on the CEAR Internal Advisory Board, and a separate member on the CEAR Board of Governors:
- Department of Risk Management Insurance, Robinson College of Business, GSU
- Department of Finance, Robinson College of Business, GSU
- School of Accounting, Robinson College of Business, GSU
- Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
- Center for Financial Innovation and Stability, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
A defining feature of the approach that CEAR takes towards risk is the attention given to the way in which risk is perceived and managed at different levels of decision-making: individuals, households, villages, local and state governments, national governments, and of course globally. These different levels of decision-making have often been studied in isolation, despite the interactions that occur between them all. CEAR will seek to integrate research that has occurred across these different levels of decision-making. The CEAR Program Directors are:
- Pierre-André Chiappori (Household Decision-Making)
- Christian Gollier (Social Decision-Making)
- Mark Machina (Individual Decision-Making)
- Karlijn Morsink (Development Economics)
- Don Ross (Methodology)
- Thomas Rutherford (Modeling Methods)
- Elisabet Rutström (Field Experiments)
- James Todd Swarthout (Lab Experiments)
- Nathaniel Wilcox (Econometric Methods)
Another feature of the activities of CEAR will be the manner in which it serves as a focal point for researchers around the world. Our intent is to use the resources provided by GSU to leverage the research that is already occurring in the best universities around the world. To this end, CEAR will provide audio-visual facilities to allow GSU-based scholarship and workshops to be shared around the world, and to virtually connect researchers in the discipline of risk. A healthy mixture of physical interaction and virtual interaction will allow greater things to be accomplished than if one relied solely on either type of interaction.