Faculty of Economics and Business

In the past decades, China has become one of the world’s leading donors of foreign aid. However, an official dataset on China’s foreign aid did not yet exist. In one of their projects, Assistant Professor Feicheng Wang and co-authors from the University of Göttingen introduce a systematic way to measure China’s foreign aid in almost real time through official customs records and assemble a Chinese Aid Exports Database, which the researchers make available for public use. Relying on it, the authors depict a comprehensive picture of China’s aid exports and find remarkable shifts in aid allocation before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Influenza vaccination uptake among health care workers (HCWs) protects patients and staff. Still, many health institutions’ coverage rates are unsatisfactory. Associate professor Laetitia Mulder and doctor Mariëtte Lokate (University Medical Center Groningen) aimed to test the effect of communicating moral appeals in increasing vaccination uptake in a real life setting.

According to Harm Rienks, who will defend his PhD at FEB next week, we need to improve our democratic institutions to make them more effective in solving our modern societal challenges. He strongly believes that any change in our democracy should be preceded by good research, since this mitigates some of the risks that are associated with tinkering with democracy. That is why Rienks dedicated his PhD to investigating how democracy functions and testing this using data about Dutch local democracy.

Starting in January, consumers in the Netherlands will pay a fixed low price for the energy they consume below a generous threshold. For consumption above that level, they pay market prices. This price cap system is likely to raise energy prices even further, FEB professor Marco Haan and other competition experts from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and SEO (an institute for economic research) predict.

With his research Assistant Professor Ahmed Skali aims to discover what triggers the rise of destructive social movements (and linked conspiracy theories) that threaten our social and political institutions and what motivates people to participate in these movements. Together with co-authors Ho Fai Chan (Queensland University of Technology), Stephanie Rizio (FEB) and Benno Torgler (Queensland University of Technology), he investigates whether social distancing restrictions are met with conspiratorial backlash, and if so, why, and whether there are public health consequences.

Health – a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being – is a crucial determinant of people’s happiness. This is something Julia Storch, PhD candidate at FEB’s Marketing department, firmly believes. However, she knows that engaging in health-promoting practices and abstaining from health-preventing behaviors can at times be easier said than done. Her mantra is that when we understand why exactly people struggle to lead a healthy lifestyle, we can come up with interventions to help them overcome possible obstacles. That is why Storch dedicated her PhD research to investigating how consumers can be motivated to implement healthy food choices and physical activity into their daily lives.

Digital transformation, the adoption of digital technology in all areas of a business, will have deep consequences for how companies operate and the way they create and deliver value. Thus, firms need to find a way to integrate such technology successfully to be future proof. Nicolai Fabian, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at FEB, finds it fascinating how organizations adopt technologies and manage the process of change. After Covid 19 hit us, that becoming more digital is vital for companies is nothing new. In his PhD thesis, which he will defend on 31 October, Fabian sheds light on the implications of digital transformation for organizations, with focus on small to medium enterprises (SME) in the third chapter.

Recent empirical evidence in economics indicates the existence of internal constraints as a potential barrier to women empowerment, which can take the form of internalized psychological barriers such as lack of aspirations, low perceived agency (or belief in oneself) or low hope, and more. To understand how these internal constraints can be alleviated to promote women’s empowerment and spur development, the Faculty of Economics and Business is involved in two international projects. One in collaboration with a microfinance institution in Vietnam, and another aimed at improving food and nutrition security by enhancing women's empowerment in Bangladesh and Ethiopia. Claire Stein, a PhD candidate at FEB, is part of the Vietnam project’s research team. To acquire input for the further project, she met with local organizations in the country and performed qualitative research with women in Vietnam to understand empowerment in the local context.

In his work, Associate Professor Stefan Pichler focuses on the economic consequences of infectious diseases and is an expert on sick leave. In recent research together with Johanna Catherine Maclean (George Mason University) and Nicolas R. Ziebarth (ZEW Mannheim), Pichler and his co-authors study the coverage, utilization, and welfare effects of mandated sick pay in the US.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, assistant professors Stephanie Rizio and Ahmed Skali decided to make a change. They moved their family from Australia to Groningen and continued their research at FEB. They told us about their experiences here, their research and their future plans.