Members

Below is an overview of persons affiliated with the Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, first listing the director and members of the Board of the Centre. Listed below are the associate members from different faculties at the University of Groningen.

Director and contact

Director Lisa Herzog may be emailed with your inquiries. She is Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, professor of Political Philosophy and president of the PPE Board.

She works at the intersection of political philosophy and economic thought. She has published on the philosophical dimensions of markets (both historically and systemically), liberalism and social justice, ethics in organizations and the future of work. The current focus of her work are workplace democracy, professional ethics, and the role of knowledge in democracies.

Board members

Dirk Bezemer is a professor in the economics of international financial development at the Faculty of Economics and Business. His long-term project is to research & teach money, banks, debt, assets, and their impacts on income growth, inequality, stability and resilience. He coined the 'debt shift' concept on the reallocation of bank credit across many developed economies, away from nonfinancial business and towards financial and real estate asset markets. He is a member of sustainablefinancelab.nl and politicsofmoney.org. He writes an economics column in de Groene Amsterdammer (groene.nl) and contributes regularly to the public debate on the Dutch economy in professional publications, newspapers and public talks. His current (2022) research is on pension funds and on sustainable finance.

Boudewijn de Bruin is professor of financial ethics. His research interests include virtue epistemology, epistemic justice, business ethics, empirical methods in philosophy. He co-directs, with Alex Oliver (Cambridge), a project on trust in banking, and, with Miranda Fricker (CUNY, Sheffield), a project on epistemic justice in finance and medicine.

Leah Henderson is a Rosalind Franklin Fellow. She works in philosophy of science on issues that bear on the role of science in society. She also has research interests in epistemology, centred on the use of evidence in decision-making in scientific and legal contexts.

Frank Hindriks is professor of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy. His research interests include moral psychology, social ontology and political philosophy. His research is interdisciplinary and incorporates insights in particular from economics and psychology. He co-directs, with Linda Steg (Groningen), a project on a just design of the energy market.

Marijke Leliveld is an associate professor on consumer ethics. As a behavioral scientist she studies why people engage in prosocial or sustainable behaviors: charity donations, buying products from cause-related marketing campaigns. Moreover, she studies how people perceive for-profit and non-profit (governmental, charitable) organizations in terms of morality.

Michael Schwan is Assistant Professor of Macro-finance and Sustainability at the Faculty of Economics and Business. His research covers financialization, banking and institutional change in political economies. He is interested in the ongoing transformation of the corporate sector, the spatial implications of public policy and its distributive consequences, and the role of business and labor power in the political process.

Andreas T. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the Faculty of Philosophy. His work is in political theory, ethics and the philosophy of public policy, particularly theories of freedom, health policy, consequentialism, distributive justice and animal ethics.

Lukas Linsi is an assistant professor in International Political Economy at the Faculty of Arts. His research addresses questions about corporate power, the structures of economic globalization and the politics of measurement and knowledge. He is particularly interested in applying empirical methods, including ‘follow-the-money’ accounting, to study hidden power relations in economic systems.(KNAW).

Associate members

Members of the Centre are spread over several Faculties of the University of Groningen.

Jutta Bolt is Aletta Jacobs Professor in Global Economic History at the University ofGroningen and also holds a position at Lund University. Her research focuses on understanding long-term comparative economic development patterns, with a special focus on Africa. Current research projects include understanding long-term health inequalities in Sub-Saharan Africa (Wallenberg Academy fellowship & Swedish Research Council project), understanding the historical origins of present-day income inequality in Africa (Core-IPD and AFLIT project) and studying the historical development of local and central government capacity in Africa. She is also the academic coordinator and one of the developers of theMaddison Project database which provides long-term income estimates for a global set of countries.

Jan Willem Bolderdijk is an assistant professor of Marketing. His research interests include, amongst others, behavioral decision making, moral psychology, social influence and sustainability. He is a fan of field experiments.

Lodi Nauta is Professor in the History of Philosophy. He works on medieval, Renaissance and early modern philosophy, and has specialized in Renaissance humanism. He tends to focus on ideas on language, ideas which of course cannot be studied in separation from ideas about knowledge, metaphysics, the mental life, culture, politics and so on.

Martijn Boot is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at University College Groningen (UCG) and Academic Director of PPE at UCG. His research interests include the implications of value-pluralism for justice, the free will debate, moral responsibility, ethical dilemmas, global justice, and the importance of integration of the three disciplines philosophy (particularly ethics), politics (especially public decision-making) and economics.

Daphne Brandenburg is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen. Her main areas of expertise are Moral Psychology and Neuroethics. Her research critically analyses how research in psychology and cognitive science has bearing on ethical questions about autonomy, consent, and responsibility. Does addiction or autism compromise a person’s responsibility for what they do? Can a person with advanced dementia consent to sexual relationships? And how do the answers to these questions impact on criminal justice, and therapy? These are key questions she addressed in her work.

Olha Cherednychenko holds the Chair in European Private Law and Comparative Law and is Founder and Director of the Groningen Centre for European Financial Services Law. Her research interests include European economic and private law, in particular financial services law, contract law, fundamental rights and private law; comparative law.

Aurelia Colombi Ciacchi is professor of Law and Governance and academic director of the Groningen Centre for Law and Governance. Her research focuses on governance-oriented comparative law, in particular for what concerns the application of human rights and other fundamental rights in relationships between private actors.

Hans van Ees is professor of corporate governance and institutions at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. His research concerns comparative corporate governance, SME-governance, internationalization strategies, emerging market multinationals, business groups, board of directors and sustainable corporate performance.

Ofer Engel is a former physicist and software design engineer. He has worked as an investigator for a European funded project on responsible research and innovation, and has engaged in teaching and research at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University in the UK. He investigated the societal aspects of distributed energy and ownership models as a postdoctoral researcher in the department of management. Ofer and his co-authors explored how income inequality within organisations could be constrained, by including it as one of the explicit goals of a Corporate Social Responsibility strategy.

Andreas Flache is professor of sociology at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. In his research he focuses on social integration, cooperation, social networks, agent-based modelling, and social complexity.

Harry Garretsen has been Professor of International Economics & Business at the University of Groningen since 2008. He is also affiliated with the University of Cambridge, and has been professor of economics Radboud University Nijmegen (1996-2002) and Utrecht University (2002-2008). His main research areas are international economics & geography; economics, management and leadership; and macro-economic theory and policy.

Francesca Giardini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and she is the coordinator of the Master track on "Social Networks in a Sustainable Society". Her research interests include micro-foundations of collective behaviors (reputation spreading and opinion dynamics), pro-social and anti-social behaviors, and social network applications to policy making.

Niels Hermes is professor of International Finance at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of international capital flows, corporate governance and microfinance.

Herman W Hoen is professor of International Political Economy at the Faculty of Arts. His research focuses on the transformation from a centrally-planned to a market economy in Eastern Europe and the successor states of the Soviet Union and he is one of the principal investigators of a large project on emerging markets in Central Asia and the Caucasus, funded by the VW Foundation. He was visiting professor at the Georg August University in Göttingen (Germany), Bilkent University in Ankara (Turkey), and the Bologna Center of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (Italy).

Christoph Humrich is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Arts. He works on social and political theory in international and world society, particularly normative theory and ethics of international relations, as well as Habermasian critical theory. His empirical research focuses on polar and ocean governance and security.

Christoph Jedan is professor of philosophy of religion and ethics in the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society, University of Groningen. HIs research focuses on interactions of religion and philosophy. He is particularly interested in the role of religion in contemporary liberal theory and in responses to loss in Western culture.

Richard Jong-A-Pin is Associate Professor in Economics (at the EEF Department of the Faculty of Economics and Business). His research focuses on the causes and consequences of political instability, expressive voting, the political economy of fiscal policy and measuring political ideology.

Herman de Jong is dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business and is professor of Economic History. His research focuses on the economic performance of nations, and topics related to income distribution, inequality, and living standards from a historical and international comparative perspective.

Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of ethics and its history at the Faculty of Philosophy. Her research interests include ethics, political philosophy, philosophical cosmopolitanism and associated issues, and the work of Immanuel Kant, in particular his political philosophy and the foundations of his moral theory.

Jan Albert van Laar is a lecturer in argumentation theory, and his main research interest are: interpersonal reasoning; dialogue types such as political deliberation, negotiation dialogue, and persuasion dialogue; fallacy theory; the connections between logic and rhetoric.

Robert Lensink is a Professor of Finance in Groningen, and a Professor of Finance and Development (parttime) at Wageningen University. He has extensive experience in impact evaluations, with a focus on microfinance in the broadest sense. In 2016, he led the MFS II evaluations of the Dutch government for India and Ethiopia.

Maeve McKeown is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen. Her research interests include structural injustice, Iris Marion Young, reparations, and feminism.

Laetitia Mulder is Associate Professor in Social and Organizational Psychology (at the department of HRM&OB, Faculty of Economics and Business). Her research interests include (im)moral behavior, integrity, compliance, norms, rules and regulations, sanctions, and the moralization of health.

Machiel Mulder is professor of Regulation of Energy Markets and director of the Centre for Energy Economics Research at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the UG and President of the Benelux Association for Energy Economics. His research focuses on the design of energy policy and the regulation of energy markets. Together with Frank Hindriks a.o. he supervises a multidisciplinary research into the design of electricity markets in relation to the growth in renewable energy.

Simon Otjes is researcher at the Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties of the University of Groningen. His research examines the structures that underlie political behaviour, at the level of the party system and at the level of the voter. Most of his research focuses on the structure of party and public opinion on economic issues.

Marc Pauly is head of the Knowledge Center Philosophy (KCF) which promotes applied philosophical research. His own research addresses the theory and practice of new forms of democracy, particularly direct and deliberative democracy.

Jan-Willem Romeijn is professor of Philosophy of Science. His research interests include decision theory, statistical inference, social epistemology and the methodology of the social sciences, in particular where those sciences interface with policy making.

Élise Rouméas is an Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen, Campus Fryslân. She specialises in analytic political theory, specifically the ethics of collective decision-making (compromise and voting) and religious diversity. Prior to joining Groningen, Élise worked as a postdoctoral researcher for a H2020 project REDEM on the ethics of voting (Sciences Po Paris) and for a project on public life and religious diversity (University of Oxford).

Adriaan Soetevent is professor of Microeconomics. His research focuses on empirical and (field) experimental research in behavioral economics, pro-social behavior and industrial economics. He has published several papers on peer effects in consumption, charitable giving, behavioral biases in gift-certificate spending and the effects of policy changes on market power.

Titus Stahl is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy. His research focuses on critical theory, social and political theory and social ontology.

Linda Steg is professor of Environmental Psychology at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on factors influencing environmental behaviour, and effects and acceptability of environmental policies. She is particularly interested in the role of values and moral considerations, and how these interact with situational factors.

Bart Streumer is professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy. He is especially interested in metaethics, and in metaethical issues in political philosophy.

Tom Wansbeek is professor of statistics and econometrics and former dean. He has published on longitudinal econometrics, latent variable modeling, psychometrics, marketing, finance, linear algebra, and economic psychology.

Erin Wilson is Director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society. Her research focuses on religion and politics, broadly defined, with particular interests in human rights, global justice, development and humanitarianism.

Rafael Wittek is professor of sociology at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. His research interests include sustainable cooperation, governance, organizational change, social network dynamics, and humanitarian action.

Ryan Wittingslow is assistant professor of philosophy of art and culture at the University College Groningen. His work is within philosophy of technology, philosophy of art, and political philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which the visual arts and urban technologies intersect with political life.

Edwin Woerdman is Professor of Markets and Regulation at the Faculty of Law. He is a political scientist, with a specialization in political philosophy, teaching economics to law students. Climate change is his main research topic, focusing on the efficiency of carbon market regulation.

Raymond Zaal is an assistant professor of Business Ethics at the Faculty of Economics and Business. His research interests include, amongst others, quantitative modeling of ethical decision making and integrity management, especially in the financial sector.

Andrej Zwitter is Professor for International Relations and Ethics endowed by the Nederlands Genootschap voor Internationale Zaken (NGIZ). His research concerns crisis management, innovation and ethics. In this domain he focuses on the law and politics of humanitarian action, politics and ethics of Big Data, and the regulation of state of emergencies.

Job de Grefte is a tenure-track assistant professor on sustainability and business ethics at the Faculty of Economics and Business. His research focuses on the demarcation of individual and collective responsibility for sustainable change and the epistemic responsibilities of individual and collective agents. He is particularly interested in human rights and SDG due diligence requirements in the financial sector, sustainable finance, and the normative underpinnings of markets.