Current PhD students
My role in the ESMEE project is to investigate and quantify the interaction between socio-technical systems and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The initial phase of the research primarily involves uncovering the interaction between these two perspectives. This includes conducting discussions with both entrepreneurs and established incumbent companies across various European regions. The subsequent task involves gathering an extensive amount of data on the factors in each European region that could influence entrepreneurship. This data will be utilized to ultimately predict which policy interventions would have the most impact in each European region.
Alexandra (Sasha) Serebriakova (Universiteit Maastricht)
DIAMOND is a research consortium of 19 partner and associate universities, funded by a HORIZON Europe Action Grant until 2025. The aim of this consortium is to improve and update six Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which are used in the simulation of climate-economic scenarios, and the analysis of policies for climate change mitigation and adaptation. A variety of demand-side and wellbeing concerns will be newly incorporated based on European data, with particular focus on household heterogeneity, sustainable development, equity, labour market dynamics, and finance.
Sophie's primary research interest revolves around financing the sustainable transition of incumbent business models. This encompasses the mapping of corporate financial structures in transforming business models, financing the phase-out of 'unsustainable' business models, and investigating the role of financial intermediaries and the effectiveness of financial instruments in sustainability transitions. Her commitment extends to teaching activities, such as the master course "Strategy, Economics, and Societal Impact" and "Social Impact Consulting Challenge" module.
This doctoral thesis explores the factors influencing intergenerational mobility among individuals facing substantial socio-economic disadvantages, with a focus on examining entrepreneurship as a potential catalyst for achieving upward economic mobility. Leveraging Dutch microdata obtained from the Centraal Bureau of Statistics, this PhD will employ a comprehensive approach to unravel the complexities surrounding the relationship between entrepreneurship and intergenerational mobility.
In order to uncouple economic development from resource use, climate change and loss of biodiversity, innovative solutions need to be developed. Recent academic and practical efforts have demonstrated that a sustainability transition achieving this goal is technically and economically feasible. Nevertheless, corresponding investments remain niches. This is puzzling because the efficient market hypothesis assuming perfect information in financial markets predicts that investment opportunities and risks are evaluated properly. However, information about the prospects and risks associated with them diffuses very slowly across different financial market players that are financing them from commercialisation to large-scale market introduction. Building on an alternative, adaptive market hypothesis, that is the fact that investors and lenders’ perceptions are playing an important role in their decision making, this doctoral thesis will focus on three mechanisms aiming at scaling up sustainable finance solutions from niche- to mainstream actors.
Social entrepreneurship and institutions
Former PhD students
Dr. Wanxiang Cai (Defense in June 2022)
We build a multilevel model to explain the relationships between social capital and crowdfunding activities at both micro- and macro-levels, as well as the cross-level causal mechanisms behind these relationships. At the micro-level, we focus on the crowdfunders’ social capital. While previous social capital-based crowdfunding research mainly discusses the role of fundraisers’ social capital in crowdfunding, little attention has been paid to crowdfunders’ social capital. Built upon research on co-investment networks, we argue that crowdfunders’ decisions are influenced by their previous co-investors, and social networks can at least partially contribute to this relationship. The empirical results confirm our arguments. However, qualitative evidence suggests that most crowdfunders rely on their private networks to make investment decisions and co-investments in previous crowdfunding campaigns cannot create strong networks that facilitate information exchange among crowdfunders. At the macro-level, this thesis examines the relationship between interregional social networks and equity crowdfunding flows from one region to another. We argue that interregional social networks can explain local bias (i.e., the tendency to invest in nearby projects) to some extent: investors obtain information advantages on local firms through their social networks. Although the results suggest an insignificant relationship between interregional social networks and crowdfunding transactions among regions after controlling for their geographic distances, the negative influence of geographic distance on across-region crowdfunding investments decreases with interregional social networks. This suggests that interregional social networks may compensate for the disadvantages from physical distance in obtaining information. Finally, we conduct a cross-level study aiming to explore the causal mechanisms of the macro-level relationships between social capital and crowdfunding activity. We expect that national social capital can affect some fundraisers’ (e.g., those who have distinctive products or services) willingness to adopt crowdfunding, thereby influencing the national crowdfunding volume in the end. We propose a conceptual framework to explain the legitimacy of distinctiveness in the crowdfunding market (and other financial markets): investors’ expectations and sensitivity to information asymmetry affect distinctive firms’ intention to fundraise in that market. The empirical results confirm our framework, as distinctive firms tend to fundraise from private equity and crowdfunding markets instead of debt markets. Furthermore, the inclination to adopt crowdfunding is stronger in countries with a higher level of social capital (i.e., crowdfunders believe that fundraisers are less likely to default).