Friedemann was granted “ius promovendi” (the right to be a PhD student's promoter) in 2025.
Current PhD students
The role of landscape finance for accelerating the transition towards regenerative agriculture
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.
Former PhD students
Dr. Xing Li “Institutions and Social Entrepreneurship: A Multilevel Perspective” (Defense in October 2024)
Social entrepreneurship (SE) involves identifying and exploiting opportunities to create social value through commercial and market-based activities. It is increasingly recognized as an important approach to addressing societal challenges that are not yet adequately tackled by existing governments, nonprofit organizations, or companies. While SE is recognized as a multilevel phenomenon involving diverse actors and processes across various levels of analysis, its explanation and effects remain only partially understood. To achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the multilevel nature of SE, I adopted a multilevel framework in this thesis to explore the various cross-level effects between macro- and microlevels on SE and its social impact. Therefore, the main research question in this PhD thesis is: How do macrolevel conditions relate to microlevel antecedents in affecting SE and its outcomes? I primarily leveraged institutional theory as the theoretical foundation to answer this research question. Overall, in this dissertation, which includes four studies reported in Chapters 2-5, I examined how institutional theory is applied in the SE domain, how macro- and microlevel antecedents jointly influence SE, and how social enterprises work with local communities to create social impact. Specifically, Chapter 2 contributes to both SE and institutional theory literature by providing an up-to-date overview of institutional theory-based SE research and discussing the ethics of SE within this research topic. It reveals three unique conversations between SE and institutions: institutional and societal change, institutional complexity and hybrid organizations, and the institutional context of SE. We further delved into each conversation, identifying new avenues for future research. We also encouraged scholars to critically examine ethics in institutional SE research and proposed several opportunities for incorporating ethics in future studies. In chapters 3 and 4, we focused on the macro-to-micro situational mechanisms in the context of SE, seeking to understand how national conditions and individual-level factors both independently and jointly predict individuals’ SE activity. Chapter 3 adopts the view of institutions as constraints and employs discovery theory of opportunities to comprehend individuals’ engagement in SE. Moving on to Chapter 4, we used the legitimacy and organizational ecology perspectives to investigate individuals’ SE behavior. These two chapters advance knowledge of SE phenomena in an explicit multilevel setting. Chapter 5 addresses recent calls for more attention to the societal impact created by SEs through the involvement of local communities. We explored what specific dynamic capabilities are needed for social enterprises to involve local communities in creating societal impact within the Chinese context. This chapter enriches our understanding of how SE fosters societal impact through community involvement, particularly in the context of China. Overall, with the above research into SE and its effects, I hope to contribute to a society where SE plays a more significant role in generating lasting change in social, cultural, and environmental issues. By gaining a deeper understanding of the multilevel nature of SE, we can craft effective policies to support the development of SE, such as encouraging the legal registration of social enterprises in different countries.
Dr. Wanxiang Cai "Social capital and crowdfunding: A multilevel perspective" (Defense in Juni 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).