The Research Assistant will work on research projects in the field of corporate governance and entrepreneurship. Projects will focus on corporate governance structures of privately held firms. There is particular interest into the influence of family control (family relationships amongst a firm’s owners and/or key decision makers), private equity ownership, and the motivation of firm employees to develop firm-specific skills (i.e. skills that are of particular value to a given company but have less valuable in the general labor market).

Attracting, retaining and developing high-quality employees is one of the most crucial concerns of privately held companies in Europe and beyond. Against this background, the intent of the project is to develop deeper understanding about the role that corporate governance can play in overcoming such barriers, hence providing relevant insights for owners and managers of privately held firms, and policy makers on the topic.

Potential tasks:

- Conduct literature reviews

- Develop formal mathematical models and/or simulation

- Assemble and work with large datasets

- Write code and estimate econometric models with the statistical software STATA.