Jan van Ours

Van Ours maintains professional affiliations with the Tinbergen Institute, CESifo, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Centre for Research and Economic Analysis on Migration, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Moreover, he is a fellow of the European Association of Labour Economists, whose president he was from 2011 to 2014, and presided also over the European Society for Population Economics (2009). He also has been a member of the Central Planning Bureau of the Netherlands since 2014. Finally, Jan van Ours performs editorial duties at the academic reviews De Economist, Labour Economics and Journal of the Economics of Aging and has done so in the past for IZA World of Labor, Economic Policy, Journal of the European Economic Association, and the European Economic Review.

In the 1990s, Jan van Ours has conducted extensive research on the topics of job search and job matching. Together with Geert Ridder, he finds that most vacancies are filled from a pool of job searchers shortly after the vacancy's posting, implying that vacancy durations reflect the duration of employers' selection process rather than applicants' search periods. Importantly, this pool not only includes unemployed but also employed job searchers, though less educated and higher educated job searchers don't tend to compete for the same jobs. Moreover, with Martin Lindeboom and Gusta Renes, van Ours finds important differences between the effectiveness of search channels: whereas employment offices are effective in matching unemployed workers, advertisements are effective for employed workers, and informal search channels are effective in both cases. Finally, comparing labour and job turnover, van Ours, Daniel Hamermesh and Wolter Hassink find that most mobility is not to new nor from destroyed jobs but rather into and out of existing jobs, firms with declining employment hire a lot and firms with expanding employment fire a lot, worker turnover is much larger than job turnover, and simultaneous hiring and firing exists.

A native of Stellendam, Jan van Ours earned a Master's degree in mining engineering from the Delft University of Technology in 1977, but subsequently changed his studies to economics, wherein he earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in 1982 and 1986. Already in 1977, van Ours became member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (1978–83), followed by an appointment to the Organisation for Labour Market Research (1983–88). In 1988, van Ours became an associate professor in economics at the Free University of Amsterdam (1988–94) before returning to Rotterdam as full professor in 1994. During his first tenure at EUR (1994–97), he also served as director of the Tinbergen Institute. In 1998, van Ours became Professor of Labor Economics at Tilburg University (1998-2016), where he also intermittently led the Department of Economics (1999-2000) and directed the Centre for Economic Research (CentER) (2001). Finally, in 2016, Jan van Ours returned to EUR, where he was appointed as Professor of Applied Economics.

Jan C. van Ours (born in Stellendam in 1954) is a Dutch economist and currently Professor of Applied Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). He belongs to the most highly cited economists in the Netherlands and is the 1996 winner of the Hicks-Tinbergen Award (together with Geert Ridder).