Dr EJS Plug (b. 1967) has been appointed professor of Intergenerational and Family Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. This is a new chair, and is part of the Amsterdam School of Economics.

Erik Plug examines how individuals make decisions within a family context, in particular to what extent individual behaviour depends on parents, partners and children. His areas of interest include parental influences on children’s school choices, the interdependency of partners’ career choices, and intergenerational mobility transfers. His research is primarily empirical, and above all centres on atypical family relationships, such as the relationship between twins, adoptive parents and adoptive children, and homosexual relationships. He has published on these topics in international refereed academic journals.

Plug obtained his PhD degree at the UvA in 1997. Since then he has worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Household and Consumer Studies at Universiteit Wageningen till 2000, and has worked as a researcher at the Economics and Econometrics Department of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. In 2004 he received a VIDI subsidy from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for his research project Zit success in de genen? (Is success in the genes?). Besides this Plug is a theme coordinator for Labour Economics at the Tinbergen Instituut. He is also a research fellow at Tinbergen Instituut in Amsterdam and the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Bonn.