Faculty of Economics and Business - University of Groningen

📣 🎓 Next week, Thursday 7 November, Amber Werkman will defend her PhD thesis on the interface between the overconsumption of food and food waste. ⚖️ 🚮 Overconsumption and food waste are two prominent challenges in the domain of food consumption that many societies are currently facing. On the one hand, people consume too much food, contributing to the worldwide surge in obesity rates. On the other hand, people waste too much food—an average of 74 kg per capita each year. While these issues have traditionally been studied in isolation, Werkman's dissertation aims to offer a more holistic understanding of consumer food consumption by considering both aspects. 🔎 💡 In the chapters of her dissertation, Werkman touches on several environmental and individual factors that influence food quantity throughout the entire consumer decision-making process. Chapter 2 reveals the food practices that link the good provider identity to household food waste. Werkman identifies excessive purchasing as the main culprit and develops and tests an intervention at the point of purchase to mitigate this tendency and reduce food purchasing quantities. Chapter 3 challenges the prevailing marketing strategy to “supersize” food, Werkman argues that packages with smaller servings and units can offer more product value. Chapter 4 investigates whether and how changing the unit size of food could contribute to a reduction in food consumption and waste. Finally, Chapter 5 provides a general discussion of this research and its outcomes, Werkman explores both managerial and practical implications, and offers directions for future research. Together, Werkman's findings highlight the critical role of selecting and acquiring appropriate food quantities in combating overconsumption and food waste. Effective win-win strategies include, for instance, nudging consumers toward smaller package sizes and packaging food in smaller servings. 🍱 🥡 You can find the complete dissertation online: https://lnkd.in/eRwNJUfT

More and more companies are appointing Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs). But what makes the presence of CSOs effective for companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR)? PhD candidate Marloes Korendijk explores this together with Professor Rian Drogendijk, who is the Director of Graduate Studies at the Faculty of Economics and Business. They examine how the relationship between CSOs and their companies’ CSR activities is shaped by firm-level factors such as board diversity and the presence of a CSR committee, as well as country-level factors like CSR standards. Additionally, the researchers investigate whether the CSO’s role is merely symbolic for CSR communication or if they have a tangible impact on CSR outcomes. #CSOs #CSR #FutureProsperity #Sustainability

📣 🎓 This week, Thursday 31 October, Samuël David Nelemans will defend his PhD thesis on a microfinancial approach to asset pricing with economic inequality. Macroeconomic research typically uses the modelling construct of the representative agent. This helps to greatly reduce the computational complexity of models and makes it look as if macroeconomic dynamics are founded in microeconomic behaviour. However, the aggregation of individuals into a representative agent has poor theoretical foundations, and the practice hides all effects of economic inequality and heterogeneity. 🔎 💡 In his dissertation, Nelemans replaces the representative agent in various macrofinancial models with a continuum of households that differ only in their wealth, income and means to consume. He shows that these differences affect financial markets in established frameworks in the literature. Nelemans finds that the macrofinancial literature can benefit from including inequality in their models to explain real-world phenomena such as the equity premium puzzle, the cross-sectional differences in stock returns and the interest rate. Moreover, he develops several new methods for analysing systems in which such heterogeneity matters. His dissertation contains three research projects. The first is an empirical exercise, showing how the cross-sectional distribution of consumption growth can explain the cross-sectional distribution of stock returns, and how this relation can be measured using firm characteristics as an intermediary. Next, Nelemans simulates a macrofinancial model with both habit formation and non-diversifiable idiosyncratic risk, which he tries to fit to historical data using the simulated generalised method of moments. Finally, he investigates how the aggregate dynamics of a Ramsey-type macroeconomic model can be dominated by a small group of households so rich that their marginal propensity to consume becomes zero. #PhdResearch #AssetPricing #Inequality #Finance #MicrofinancialApproach

The Faculty of Economics & Business and the Oranjewoud Export Academy (Oranjewoud) organized their second Northern Business Safari at the beginning of October. Both parties continued their collaboration after a successful first edition of the Business Safari in May 2024. During this second Safari, a group of about 50 students from the Master in Business Administration - Small Business & Entrepreneurship visited three Oranjewoud members in Leeuwarden. The students, who were accompanied by lecturers Evelien Croonen and Maryse Brand, met with the companies’ CEOs and managers and brainstormed with them about relevant strategic and managerial challenges. 🔗 🤝 The Northern Business Safaris form an important part of the strategic cooperation between FEB and Oranjewoud. During this month’s Safari, the students visited Jongia Mixing Technology, Wafilin Systems, and FIB Industries. These are all very innovative Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) that offer high-tech, customized solutions to their clients (manufacturers) in industries such as food, beverage and dairy. The three companies are innovative players in their international niche markets, and FEB students typically do not meet such ‘hidden gems’ during FEB career events. 💎 The student visits at Jongia and Wafilin started off with a brief presentation by the companies’ representatives and was followed by a guided tour in their premises, after which the students brainstormed about questions - about employer branding and attracting young international talent- posed by the company in questions. The second part of the day was spent at FIB Industries. After a presentation about FIB Industries and a guided tour through several production halls, the students brainstormed on a joint question by the three participating companies. Since Jongia, Wafilin and FIB Industries are part of a group of companies that aim to increase their strategic cooperation, the students were asked to brainstorm about potential common grounds and fields for strategic cooperation.  💡 Both the participating students and companies found the Business Safari a valuable experience. Of the students said: “I had never heard of this company before, but I was pleasantly surprised. I liked the whole atmosphere there. I will not forget this visit." One of the managers stated: "With a group of university students like this, expectations are usually high when it comes to the feedback we could expect. These expectations were met! We received very useful tips from the students. They also provided input and advice on various topics. It was very special to receive this, as it offered a fresh perspective on our company, focused on the future market and employees. So, we were very pleased with that. All in all, it was a successful meeting, definitely worth repeating!”

We are proud to present the autumn 2024 edition of the FEB Research Newsletter. In this fourth edition of 2024, Assistant Professor Anne Kellers introduces herself. She recently started working at FEB and is excited to work on world-class interdisciplinary research within the department of Global Economics and Management. We also present one of our Impact cases: the the large-scale interdisciplinary Lifelines Corona Research Study. And Hans Risselada and Marijke Leliveld 🟥 talk about their new collaborative project with charity consulting firm Data Inside, which aims to enable charity organizations to make better data-driven decisions. Read the newsletter: https://lnkd.in/g6qbdwSM

🏆 Join us in congratulating Jeroen van der Vaart, who has won the Netspar thesis award for his PhD thesis, ‘Health Risks in Old Age: Implications for Household Savings and Insurance’. 👏 Each year, Netspar, the Dutch Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement, awards two prizes to exceptional Msc and PhD theses on aging and financing retirement. 🎓 Van der Vaart recently obtained his PhD at Faculty of Economics and Business - University of Groningen, where he now works as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher. His PhD is supervised by promotor professor Rob Alessie and daily supervisors dr. Max Groneck and dr. Raun van Ooijen. 🔎 In his thesis, Van der Vaart studied heterogeneity in long-term care and mortality risks, as well as their implications for public and private insurance. Using Dutch administrative data, he examined factors affecting the duration of and transitions between formal long-term care use types (home-based care or institutional care). Compared to having a cognitive impairment, he found that a physical impairment relates to shorter long-term care periods and a more important role for informal care in reducing long-term care use. Additionally, higher financial resources and homeownership delay long-term care use, indicating a potential demand for private long-term care options. Van der Vaart also studied adverse selection within private annuity- and long-term care insurance markets. Although combining these insurances can mitigate selection problems when the risks of survival and long-term care are negatively correlated, his findings indicate that this is insufficient to address selection problems fully. Furthermore, Van der Vaart examined to what extent socioeconomic differences in long-term care and mortality shape the welfare distribution in the Netherlands. He found that households with higher socioeconomic status experience higher welfare than those with lower socioeconomic status because they receive pensions for a longer period, have shorter nursing home stays, and can leave larger bequests. In the final chapter, which is joint work with FEB professor Gerard van den Berg, Van der Vaart develops the econometric framework for his analyses: a duration model for truncated data with unobserved heterogeneity. Fostering collaborative research Van der Vaart received the award from the chairman of Netspar's Editorial Board, Andries de Grip, along with a cash prize of € 3,000 during the Netspar Pension Day. The researcher thanked Netspar for their continuous support and for fostering such a welcoming and collaborative environment for researchers in pensions, aging, and retirement. “I would like to thank Netspar for everything they have done for me over the past six years, which means a great deal to me. A special thanks also goes to my PhD supervisors, Rob Alessie, Raun van Ooijen, and Max Groneck, as well as my alma mater, the University of Groningen, and FEB in particular.”

Assistant Professor Katrin Heucher is one of six FEB researchers who received an acceleration grant from FEB's Research Institute. 👏 She has extensively researched how individuals can catalyze positive social change from within organizations. FEB Research talked to her about her project proposal and what she intends to achieve. 📰 Read the interview with Katrin below.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Simon Johnson (MIT), and James Robinson (University of Chicago) for their pioneering studies on how institutions are formed and how they affect prosperity. 👏 🏆 Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson's work seeks to answer a fundamental question: Why are some countries rich while others remain poor? The laureates have shown that differences in countries' prosperity often stem from institutions introduced during colonization. University of Groningen economics professors Jutta Bolt and Robert Inklaar, who both focus on similar themes in their research for the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC), want to emphasize the importance of research on income differences worldwide and highlight the value of the data making this research possible. 👩💻 🔎 📰 Read Bolt and Inklaar's article below.

📣 🎓This week, Thursday 17 October, Žan Mlakar will defend his PhD thesis on the triggers and dynamics of sudden societal shifts. ⚖️ If we are to address the global crises currently facing humanity (e.g. climate change, pandemics), a widespread change in the norms, conventions, and other paradigms underlying our social systems is needed. Such change typically occurs via social tipping. This is a process in which, after a critical mass of conversion from a status quo convention to an alternative has been reached, a self-propelling process is triggered that guarantees an explosive shift to the alternative among the rest of the population. In his thesis, Mlakar devises and applies an experimental method that recreates social tipping. Doing so allows him to, across the three empirical chapters of his dissertation, examine how social tipping comes about and how it unfolds. 🔎 In Chapter 2, Mlakar devises the aforementioned experimental method and applies it to examine the role of identifiability in tipping. He finds that identifiability delays the abandonment of a status quo convention within a group. In Chapter 3, he further applies the same methodology to examine the role of minority consistency in tipping.  Mlakar discovers that a consistent minority is perceived as more confident, which leads to a higher likelihood of tipping, but also as uncompromising, which leads to the opposite—it decreases tipping likelihood. In Chapter 4, he extends this experimental method with agent-based simulations and looks at the dynamics driving change after a tipping point has been reached. Mlakar observes that an interplay between peoples’ motivations to remain inert yet follow societal trends produces the shape of s-curves characteristic of social tipping. #PhdResearch #SocietalShifts #SocialTipping

This year’s 16th edition of the EBF Conference was a milestone for the FEB Alumni Network! For the first time, they hosted a special alumni programme, bringing together over 25 alumni for a day full of networking, learning, and reconnecting. Alumni enjoyed a Meet & Greet with none other than Paul Polman, FEB alumnus and former CEO of Unilever, followed by an Alumni Masterclass.The masterclass focused on major global economic trends, led by Joeri Schasfoort, with insights from a panel of university professors Steven Brakman, Robert Inklaar and Jakob De Haan. Some key takeaways from the speakers: "Your path chooses you, you choose how to walk it" – Erik-Jan Mares (CEO Zeeman) "One sign of staying young is when your to-do list is longer than your done list." – Paul Polman (Former CEO Unilever) "Start with making small changes to make an impact" – Jos Baeten (CEO a.s.r.) “Move faster than the others" – Gianluca De Leo & Brend Koolhof (Founders of Bozu, Groningen alumni) And last but not least a big thank you to the board of the alumni foundation—Joram Kok, Niek Wiltjer, Sylvia Wolffram-Bijkerk, Mark Gertsen, and Susanne Klinkers—for making everything possible. Looking forward to seeing more of you at future alumni events! #Alumni #Networking #Lifelonglearning #Engagement #FEBAlumni #EBFConference #UniversityofGroningen