Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business has named Glenn Harrison, a native of Australia, as the first director of a new center on economic risk analysis.
The Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk will bring together the world’s best researchers to examine threats such as swine flu and global warming, Dr. Harrison told GlobalAtlanta. It will be housed within Robinson’s Department of Risk Management and Insurance. U.S. News and World Report this year ranked Robinson’s undergraduate risk management program the sixth best in the U.S.
The new center was created in conjunction with Robinson’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
A goal of the center is to link researchers with government policy makers. For example, officials rewriting county or city building codes to reduce potential hurricane damage might participate in a workshop with insurance experts who are calculating how global warming will affect hurricanes strengths and patterns, Dr. Harrison said. Sharing information and analytical tools can make it possible for government and business to create more accurate risk projections on the economy, health and the environment, he added.
Risk has become a larger issue in the corporate world since the wild economic gyrations of the last year as the world economy went into a deep recession. “We find more people worried about things they weren’t worried about a year ago,” Dr. Harrison said.
But if a company is too cautious, it might miss opportunity to gain market share. “What we want to get back to is more of a balance,” said Dr. Harrison. The new center will try to help by providing the best information, tools and experts for accurate risk predictions, he also said.
Dr. Harrison received undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a doctorate in economics from the University of California Los Angeles. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and the University of South Carolina. His most recent faculty position was at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
As a consultant, he worked with the World Bank, the governments of the United States, Denmark and Sweden and the Harvard Institute for International Development.
He still has family in Australia and travels there twice a year. “I still have my accent, I hope,” said Dr. Harrison.
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