dr. SJA (Jolanda) Hessels

Biography

Jolanda Hessels is associate professor at Erasmus School of Economics and serves as head of the Strategy Economics group and Deputy Director of the Department of Applied Economics. Jolanda is a research fellow of the Tinbergen Institute and a member of Erasmus Research Institute in Management (ERIM). She is the academic director of the Master Specialization in Strategy Economics at ESE.

Jolanda’s research focuses on entrepreneurship, looking into entry, exit and performance of entrepreneurs. She is interested in how characteristics of countries (e.g., institutions, FDI), firms (e.g., a firm’s age structure) and individuals (e.g., personality, relationship status, human capital, career progression as employee) associate with entrepreneurship. Her research has received over 11,000 citations based on Google scholar and her H-index is 33.

In current projects Jolanda looks into how previous careers of entrepreneurs and their hiring strategies affect the performance of their firms. She also investigates the role of large firms for explaining declining entrepreneurship rates.

Jolanda is an Editor at the journal Small Business Economics (Journal Impact Factor 2023: 6.5; Article Influence Score 2023: 1.8) since 2017. 

She is a Scientific Member of the Advisory Board of the Startup panel of ZEW in Mannheim.