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Chairholder

Georges Dionne is full professor of Finance and holds the Canada Research Chair in Risk Management at HEC Montréal.
Click here for a recent, more personal presentation of the Chairholder.

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He has been a visiting scholar in the departments of Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University and the Wharton School in the US, and in the Economics departments at Ecole Polytechnique and Université Paris X in France for many years.
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Georges Dionne won the Kulp-Wright Book Award (2002) for his book Handbook of Insurance, the Pierre Laurin Award for research from HEC Montréal (1998, 2003, 2009), the PRMIA award (2006), the Bank of Canada NFA Conference Award (2006), an Honorary PhD conferred by the University of Orléans (2006), and the GARP Award at the Financial Management Association European Conference (2008).
 
He is an Honor Alumnus of the Faculty of Arts and Science of the Université de Montréal (2008), and was one of 30 researchers chosen as part of the SSHRC’s celebration of 30 years of cultivating excellence in Canadian social sciences and humanities research (2008).
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More recently, he received the Innis-Gérin Medal (2011) for his original contribution to the social sciences literature and the Jean Guertin Award (2011), HEC Montréal’s top prize for teaching excellence, for the support provided to his graduate students and for having developed a new field of teaching and expertise at HEC Montréal: risk management. He won the Marcel Dagenais Award in 2012, the John S. Bickley Founder’s Award in 2016, and the Harris Schlesinger Award for research excellence in 2022.
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Georges Dionne has published extensively: he has written two books on risk management, edited six books on insurance and published 175 articles in academic journals. He has more than 11,000 citations on Google Scholar and his h-index is equal to 57. He has been the director of 36 Ph.D. theses and of 138 Master theses or research reports.
 
He has been the Editor of The Journal of Risk and Insurance for six years, and is a member of the scientific committee of other journals including the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, (USA) and the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review (Switzerland).
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Georges Dionne led the team that developed the model for computing the Credit VaR model of a Canadian bank in 2001 and the model for computing the Operational Risk VaR of another bank in 2006. These two activities have important implications for the Basel international banking regulations. The two advanced models of risk management allow banks to save capital by applying portfolio diversification strategies.
 
His research interests also include road safety. One of his main achievements was to propose (with Marcel Boyer) a new model for automobile insurance pricing based on drivers’ demerit points. This model was implemented by the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec in 1992 and is still used in Quebec.
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In the insurance sector, Georges Dionne collaborated on many projects concerning the detection of insurance fraud in claims. In collaboration with the Insurance Bureau of Canada, he conducted a comprehensive study to evaluate the significance of insurance fraud in insurers’ files in Quebec. More recently, with Pierre Picard and Florence Giuliano, he developed an internal model for fraud detection for a large European insurer. This model was able to reduce insurance fraud costs by up to 40%. During the recent years, he studied the capacity of the US insurance industry to pay for catastrophe risks, including climate risks. His current research includes mergers and acquisitions and inflation in the insurance sector.
 
With his coauthors Pierre-Carl Michaud and Maki Dahchour, he is among the first researchers to empirically separate moral hazard from adverse selection and drivers’ learning using data on insurance contracts.
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With Cedric Poutré and Gabriel Yergeau, he analysed the profitability of arbitrage with high frequency data.

 

His current research research activities include the effect of climate risk on the insurance industry and the effect of inflation on insurance companies.

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Occupations
  • Full professor of Finance, HEC Montréal
  • Member of the Board and of the Audit Committee, and President of the Risk Committee SCOR Canada https://www.scor.com/en/the-group/about-us.html
  • Associate researcher: Interuniversity Research Center on Enterprise Networks, Logistics, and Transportation (CIRRELT)
 
Chairholder links
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Significant contributions
SSRN page
IDEAS-RePEc page
Risk Management page
Google Scholar Page 
Short curriculum vitae (pdf version)
Curriculum vitae (pdf version)
Researchers in insurance
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Awards
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  • Harris Schlesinger prize for research excellence (2022)
  • Kulp-Wright Award for the book Corporate Risk Management: Theories and Applications (2021)
  • American Risk and Insurance Best Article Award (2020)
  • Roger-Charbonneau book Award, HEC Montréal (2019)
  • Fellow, Canadian Economics Association (2019)
  • Award for the best paper published in 2017 in the Journal of Operational Risk (2018)
  • John S. Bickley Founder’s Award of the International Insurance Society (2017)
  • Fellow, Institut Louis Bachelier (2016)
  • Best publication of ESG UQAM award to X. Zhou (2016)
  • Kulp-Wright Award for the Second edition of the Handbook of Insurance (2015)
  • Best Paper Award from the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review (2015)
  • Article selected for inclusion in the collection of 10 articles in the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review to mark its 40th anniversary (2015)
  • Marcel Dagenais Award (2012),
  •  Jean Guertin Award (2011),
  •  Innis-Gérin Medal from the Royal Society of Canada(2011), 
  • Pierre Laurin Award (2009),
  • Honor Alumnus, Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Montreal (2008), 
  • EFMA-GARP Award (2008), 
  • Honorary Ph.D. conferred by the Université d’Orléans (2006), 
  • NFA Conference Award(2006), 
  • PRMIA Award (2006),
  • Pierre Laurin Award (2003),
  • Kulp-Wright Book Award (2002), 
  • Gérard Parizeau Award(2002),
  • François-Albert Angers Award (2001),
  • Risques-Les Échos Special Award (2001),
  • Member of The Royal Society of Canada (2000),
  • Marcel Vincent Award (1999),
  • Pierre Laurin Award (1998).
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International activities
  • Member of the international scientific council, Institut Louis Bachelier.
  • Member of the Scientific Board, SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science.
  • Member of the scientific committee for those journals: 
    • Asia Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance, Singapore 
    • Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance: Issues and Practice, Switzerland 
    • Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Switzerland 
    • Insurance and Risk Management, Canada 
    • Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, USA 
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