This year’s theme of the VESTING Conference is “Roaring 20’s 2.0: Old Problems, New Solutions”. Due to the recent Corona-crisis, many companies faced unpreceden ted issues. This clearly caused some major problems, but also gave rise to some very innovative ideas. For a lot of companies, the crisis was the ideal situation to make some drastic improvements in which econometrics, operations research and actuarial science played major roles. The current health crisis has brought about frequent comparisons with another virus outbreak that occurred over a hundred years ago, the Spanish Flu of 1918. The successive period, mostly referred to as the Roaring Twenties, was a decade of economic growth and widespread prosperity, also driven by recovery from wartime devastation and deferred spending, a boom in construction and the rapid growth of consumer goods.
To draw the parallel between the crisis before the Roaring Twenties and the corona crisis may be somewhat far-fetched, however in a broader scheme of things there are a lot of similarities. The main focus for the VESTING Conference will be the application of econometrics, operations research and actuarial science on innovation during and after crisis.