Georges Dionne (professor)

Georges Dionne is a full professor of finance who holds the Canada Research Chair in Risk Management at HEC Montréal. He has been a visiting scholar in the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University and in the Economics Department at Ecole Polytechnique in France for many years.

Georges Dionne
Born	Saint-Arsène (Canada)
Scientific career
Fields	Economics, Finance, Insurance, Risk Management

Georges Dionne has won the Kulp-Wright award (2002, 2015) for his book Handbook of Insurance, the Pierre-Laurin research prize from HEC Montréal (1998, 2003, 2009, 2016), the PRMIA award (2006), the Bank of Canada NFA Conference award (2006), an Honorary Ph.D. conferred by the University of Orléans (2006), and the GARP award at the Financial Management Association European Conference (2008). He is an Alumnus of Honor of the Faculty of Arts and Science of Université de Montréal (2008), and has been one of the 30 researchers chosen as part of the SSHRC’s celebration of 30 years of cultivating excellence in Canadian social sciences and humanities research (2008). More recently, he received the Innis-Gérin Medal (2011) for his original contribution to the social sciences in Canada 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 the School: risk management. He won the Marcel-Dagenais Award in 2012, the Roger-Charbonneau Award for the best book of the year in 2019, and was elected Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association in 2019. He received the Harris Schlesinger prize for research excellence in 2022.

Georges Dionne has published extensively, including seven books on insurance and risk management and more than 180 articles in academic journals. He has been the Editor-in-chief of The Journal of Risk and Insurance, and is member of the scientific committee for nine journals including the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, (USA) and the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review (Switzerland). In 2018, he received the best paper award from the Journal of Operational Risk and, in 2020, the best paper award from the Risk Management and Insurance Review.

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 advance 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.

In the insurance sector, Georges Dionne has collaborated on many projects concerning detection of insurance fraud in claims. In collaboration with the Insurance Bureau of Canada, he has 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 has 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%. 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. He also has contributed to the economic evaluation of human life for public investment projects.