Aaro Hazak (Project Leader, Head of WP7), Professor of Institutional Economics, has led several research grant projects and applied studies on the nexus of individual health and economic behaviour, institutions and socio-economic development. He has conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), and he has been a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki (Finland), Aalto University (Finland), Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (Finland), Macquarie University (Australia), University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), Bank of Estonia and other institutions.
Kadri Männasoo (Co-Head of WP2), Professor of Microeconometrics, has extensive research experience on the drivers of R&D activities in emerging markets in comparison to European developed economies. She has a broad international research network, and for example Männasoo and Mayes (2009) was in 2010 listed among the 1% of most cited authors in economics (Essential Science Indicators Citations Report). She has been a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, and a visiting scholar at Hamburg University and Bank of Finland.
Merike Kukk (Co-Head of WP3) Associate Professor, Head of the Master programme in Applied Economics at TalTech, and part-time economist in Eesti Pank (the central bank of Estonia). Her research topics cover household borrowing, saving, consumption and household tax behaviour. She is Principal Investigator in the private sector funded (ING) research project “Intra-household Money Management” under the Think Forward Initiative (TFI). She has been involved in several projects funded by the European Commission, including a project on over-indebtedness of households, a project on estimating tax evasion among households in Europe and a study for understanding gender pay and pension gaps in Estonia – the country with biggest gender pay gap in Europe.
Simona Ferraro (Co-Head of WP4) PhD, Senior Lecturer in Economics, with study and research experience from the University of Palermo and Politecnico di Milano in her homeland Italy, and TalTech where she has undertaken her PhD studies, research and lecturing in microeconomics. Her research focus is individual employment and educational decisions using parametric and non-parametric methods to evaluate the determinants of schools’ and students’ performance and equity and efficiency levels in education and within labour markets.
Karin Jõeveer (Head of WP5), Associate Professor of Finance and Banking and Head of the Department of Economics and Finance, joined TalTech in 2014 from London School of Economics (UK), having previously been a staff member at Queen's University Belfast (UK) and Keele University (UK). She has her Master and PhD degrees from CERGE-EI (Czech Republic) and her research is primarily focussed on the performance of the financial sector in emerging-market economies, including the efficiency of lending institutions and small and medium-sized enterprises in transition economies. She is the Head of the PhD programme in Economics and Finance at TalTech and coordinator of the Doctoral School in Economics and Innovation.
Kirsti Rumma (Head of WP6), PhD, Senior Lecturer in Business Mathematics, Statistics and Quantitative Methods, has her PhD degree from the University of Agder (Norway), has a leading role in an interdisciplinary research group investigating subjective well-being of teachers in Estonia. She has acted as Principal Investigator / Team Member in several projects in related areas.
Aalto University (Aalto)
Matti Keloharju (Co-Head of WP3) is Aalto Distinguished Professor, Academy Professor, and Eero Kasanen Professor of Finance at Aalto. He is also Research Fellow of the CEPR and Research Associate of the IFN, and has in the past held visiting positions at Harvard Business School, New York University, and UCLA. He has specialised in applying unique data sets to analyse the behaviour of various economic agents, such as individual and institutional investors, corporate executives, and consumers, and the consequences of their behaviour. Professor Keloharju’s work has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Management Science.
Juuso Välimäki is an internationally renowned Professor of Economics, at the Department of Economics at Aalto. His research focuses on dynamic games of incomplete information and on topics in mechanism design. He is a Fellow of Econometric Society and was the Main Editor at the Journal of the European Economic Association (5-year Impact Factor 4.6).
Markku Kaustia is the Hannes Gebhard Professor of Finance and Insurance at Aalto. His research on investor behaviour and other topics has been published in the top finance journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Professor Kaustia has previously held top university teaching positions at Columbia University, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania, at the Wharton School. His current research interests include investor behaviour broadly, and especially in connection to socially responsible investing, climate change, and fintech.
Otto Toivanen is a Professor of Economics at Aalto and Director of the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics. His research has been widely published in top academic outlets. Professor Toivanen specialises in industrial organisation and his recent topics include economics of innovation, competition and related individual and other incentives.
Vesa Puttonen is Professor of Finance at Aalto. He has published 16 books and over 30 journal articles on different fields of behavioural finance, strategic finance, risk management, and investing. Professor Puttonen has also served as a board member at several Finnish companies. He has teaching experience from MBA programs in Helsinki, Hong Kong, Singapore, Poland, China, Iran, Taiwan and South Korea.
Matti Suominen is Professor of Finance and Associate Dean of Research. From 1997 until 2006 he was in the faculty at INSEAD, and he has taught finance in other leading business schools such as Wharton, IESE, Chinese University of Hong Kong and HEC. Professor Suominen holds a PhD in Financial Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of research are information economics in financial markets, financial institutions and corporate finance. He has published articles in several leading academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, Review of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Asset Pricing Studies, and the Journal of Financial Markets (where he received the Best Paper Award).
Elias Rantapuska is Associate Professor of Finance and Head of the Department of Finance at Aalto. After receiving his doctoral degree from the Helsinki School of Economics, Elias Rantapuska worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company for four years. He joined Aalto as Assistant Professor in 2010 and has since then also held visiting positions at the Bank of Finland, BI Norwegian Business School, Erasmus University, and New York University. Elias Rantapuska’s work has appeared in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Finance, among others. His current research interests include the role of feelings, experiences, and family relationships in investment decisions.
University of Helsinki (UH)
N. Emrah Aydinonat, PhD, is a Senior Researcher in Practical Philosophy and one of the chief Editors of the Journal of Economic Methodology, a member of the editorial board of the History of Economic Ideas, and a member of the board of directors of the International Network for Economic Methodology. He has a PhD in Economics & Philosophy from the Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands). His research focuses on models and explanation (particularly in economics), and social institutions. He is the author of The Invisible Hand in Economics (Routledge, 2008) and co-editor of Economics Made Fun: The Philosophy of the Pop-economics (Routledge, 2015).
Michiru Nagatsu (Co-Head of WP2), PhD, Associate Professor of Inter- and Transdisciplinary Methodologies, a member of TINT (Centre for Philosophy of the Social Sciences) and Vice-Head of Practical Philosophy at UH. His research interests include methodology of behavioural economics, foundations of pro-sociality, and philosophy of sustainability science.
Hannu Vartiainen, Professor of Microeconomic Theory at UH and Deputy Director of the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics (GSE), a joint initiative of Aalto, Hanken School of Economics, and UH. His research concerns economic theory, in particular game theory, mechanism design, decision theory, and social choice theory. He is currently studying dynamics of coalition formation and commitment in mechanism design.
Tiina Paunio, MD (1993), PhD (1995), Professor of Psychiatry at UH and Research Professor at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), has a special interest in genetic background for psychiatric disorders and sleep-related disturbances, interaction of the genetic risk with environment, and development of individualised research-based tools to ameliorate sleep- and stress-related disturbances. She is Vice Dean at the Faculty of Medicine at UH; Vice President of the European Sleep Research Society, and Deputy Editor for Journal of Sleep Research. She is responsible for postgraduate studies on Psychiatry and acts as Program Director of the SleepWell Research Program at UH.
Markku Partinen, internationally renowned professor of neurosciences, Principal Investigator of Sleep Research at the Institute of Clinical Medicine at UH, Director of the Helsinki Sleep Clinic Vitalmed Research Centre, has worked as a postdoc researcher at Stanford University, and served on the Editorial Boards and as Assistant Editor of Sleep, Journal of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine. He is the founder (1988) of the Finnish Sleep Research Society and the Finnish Sleep Federation (1998) and he has been Vice-President of the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS) and President of the World Association of Sleep Medicine (WASM).
Uskali Mäki, PhD, Professor emeritus in Practical Philosophy at UH, is the director of TINT (Center for Philosophy of Social Science). He was Academy of Finland Professor (2006-2011, 2012-2017) and PI of Centre of Excellence (2012-2017). Professor Mäki was Director at Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE), Erasmus University Rotterdam (1995-2006). He is one of the founding figures in economic methodology, having served as an editor of Journal of Economic Methodology [JEM](1996-2005) and Chair of the International Network for Economic Method [INEM] (2007-2008).
Tel Aviv University (TAU)
Ayala Arad (Co-Head of WP4), PhD, Associate Professor, received her PhD in Economics at TAU and after two years of post-doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Coller School of Management at TAU in 2013. Her research interests concern bounded rationality in individual decision-making processes and strategic interactions. This involves experimental studies of the psychological aspects of decision making with the goal of identifying systematic deviations from the classic choice models and using the findings to inspire novel models of behaviour.
Tal Mofkadi, PhD in Financial Economics from TAU (2013), has academic interests in applied financial modelling, individual investment decisions and microeconomic theory. He has published three textbooks on various aspects of finance and financial modelling, has received numerous excellent research and teaching awards, and he has a vast international teaching experience from the University of Amsterdam, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, Copenhagen Business School as well as TalTech.
David Disatnik, PhD, is a senior faculty member in the Coller School of Management at TAU, and the founder and managing partner of DNR Hedge Fund. He has a PhD in Accounting and Finance from TAU. Prior to Joining the Coller School of Management, he worked for the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. His main research topics include investment decisions and risk management.
Yair Antler, PhD, is a member of the Strategy and Business Economics group at TAU. He earned his PhD in Economics from TAU in 2016, worked at the University of Essex between 2016-2018, and has been a Research Affiliate of the Industrial Organisation programme of the CEPR since 2017. He joined the Coller School of Management in 2018, and his research focuses on industrial organisation and processes in organisations, often combining elements from behavioural economics.
Ariel Rubinstein – who will be the keynote speaker for the ECEE conference in June 2021 under project IBEP – is an internationally highly renowned Professor of Economics at the School of Economics at TAU and the Department of Economics at New York University. His main fields of research are Economic Theory, Decision Theory, Models of Bounded Rationality and Game Theory. In 1982, he published the Rubinstein bargaining model, which is one of the most influential findings in game theory. Professor Rubinstein has more than 100 published research articles, several books, and many book reviews. He has served as the President of the Econometric Society in 2004, and he is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Economic Association. He has had a large number of visiting positions at top universities such as University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and London School of Economics. He has given more than 30 invited lectures at prominent events all around the world. Professor Rubinstein has held editorial positions in several top journals including Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory and Review of Economic Studies. As of now, he has received 19 honours from well-known associations and communities.
Itzhak Gilboa – who has kindly agreed to be a keynote speaker for the ECEE conference under project IBEP – is an internationally highly renowned Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at TAU and at HEC Paris. He has extensive research experience in decision theory and other fields in economic theory such as game theory and social choice. He has more than 90 publications in addition to many published books and edited books. He has been in editorial boards of many leading scientific journals such as Econometrica, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory and International Journal of Game Theory. Professor Gilboa has been honoured several times by many universities including Yale University and he has been awarded with the Frederic E. Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Decision Sciences position during 1992-1997.
