I have been, or currently am, co-promotor for (anti-chronological ordering):
Junyu Chen (joint with Lingwei Kong and Weining Wang)
Junyu started his PhD in September 2024 working on the project Financial Econometrics and Large Language Models (LLMs), which lies at the intersection between machine learning and econometrics.
Sander van Beek (promotor: Gerard van den Berg)
Sander: I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Groningen. My research interests include duration analysis and nonparametric statistics. Specifically, I focus on developing methods to test and better account for unobserved heterogeneity in duration models. In my spare time, I enjoy running and playing board games. Feel free to reach out to me!
Sander's webpage is here!
Hans Ligtenberg (promotores: Aico van Vuuren and Tom Boot, date of thesis defense: July 3, 2025)
Hans: In my time as a PhD student under the supervision of Tom Boot and Aico van Vuuren, I worked on instrumental variable models and how we can ensure that conclusions drawn from these models are reliable. In particular, I studied the case in which there are many instrumental variables, that may or may not contain much information about the variable of interest. After showing that in this case conventional methods do not work well, I developed flexible methods that are reliable and are applicable to many different data types.
Hans' webpage is here! We wrote the paper "Identification- and many instrument-robust inference via invariant moment conditions" (R&R Journal of Econometrics).
Jhordano Aguilar Loyo (promotor: Gerard van den Berg, co-promotor: Lammertjan Dam, date of thesis defense: September 19, 2024)
Jhordano: My research is about panel data models, with a special focus on using them to estimate treatment effects. I started my PhD journey at the University of Groningen in September 2020, and I will defend (note by Tom: defended!) my thesis in September 2024.
Groningen is truly a student city. When students say, "The city is our campus," they aren't exaggerating! This statement is backed by the lively pubs and clubs that fill the city center.
Jhordano's webpage is here! We wrote the paper "Grouped heterogeneity in linear panel data models with heterogeneous error variances" published in the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics. Update: Jhordano's paper on TWFE estimators in DiD designs has been published by the Journal of Econometrics here!
Gilian Ponte (promotor: Jaap Wieringa, date of thesis defense: June 10, 2024)
Gilian: In my research I try to address societally relevant issues in marketing. Currently, I work on the balance between privacy protection (using differential privacy) and the ability to derive insights from data. For example, is it still possible to derive profits from targeting under a privacy protection guarantee for consumers? For the near future, I would like to study misinformation and online echo chambers.
Gilian's webpage is here! Together with Jaap Wieringa and Peter Verhoef, we wrote "Where’s Waldo? A framework for quantifying the privacy-utility trade-off in marketing applications" published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Nick Koning (promotor: Paul Bekker, date of thesis defense: May 10, 2021)
Nick: Since finishing his PhD, Nick has specialized in the fundamentals of hypothesis testing. He currently works on testing exchangeability and other forms of invariances as well as e-values and sequential testing.
Nick's webpage is here!