Roy Thurik is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship at Erasmus University Rotterdam, of Entrepreneurship and Small Firms at the Free University in Amsterdam and of Entrepreneurship and Economics at Montpellier Business School in France. He is a Research Fellow at two renowned Dutch research schools: the Tinbergen Institute for Economic Sciences and the Erasmus Research Institute for Management.

Roy's research focuses on the role of small firms in markets, the role of business owners in firms, industrial organisation and policy, geno-economics, nascent entrepreneurship and the consequences and causes of entrepreneurship in economies.

His research has been published in more than two hundred articles in leading international academic journals. He is (co)-editor of several scholarly books and serves on the editorial boards of many academic journals. He consulted with many firms and (international) institutions.

Roy’s courses included Small Business Economics, Economics of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship and Small Business at EUR and Economics and Management of SMEs at the Free University Amsterdam. He coordinated the master’s program Entrepreneurship and Strategy Economics, the bachelor III major Entrepreneurship and Organization and the campus minor Entrepreneurship in the Modern Economy at the Erasmus School of Economics. He set up the famous Erasmus Masterclass Entrepreneurship.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in November 2014.