Croatian coast, 2006
My research is structured along three related dimensions. Their relatedness concerns the institutional core.
1. Culture, institutions and economic performance
This line of research concentrates on the relationship between trust, social capital, norms and values (and the development of these) on the one hand, and economic development on the other hand. This has been the theme of Ph.D thesis (sept. 2003) which was titled "Culture and Economic Development in Europe". Part of this project focused on the role of entrepreneurial culture, regional innovativeness and economic development. Trust and especially social capital have been hot issues in academia. Social capital is a multidimensional construct. It looks like economists, political scientists and management scholars are talking about similar phenomena, but most of them do not. Social capital means many things for many people. It serves multiple political and academic agendas. I feel that the main distinction that should be made concerns the distinction between levels of analysis (apart from the different types of social capital that are used in the literature). Are we talking firms or aggregate entities like nation-states?
Future (new) work in this area is relatively limited. Together with my colleague Robbert Maseland I am writing a book titled "Culture in economics" , basically making the point that due to the inclusion of culture in economics, some rather important (old and some new) methodological issues arise.
2. Institutions and the geography of the multinational firm
In this line of research I link institutions and differences in institutions to the economic organization of firms. The main question concerns the relationship between (country specific) institutions and the way multinationals organize their economic activity. This concerns practical questions like:
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How and why do firms invest in certain countries?
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Given the cultural and institutional characteristics of the host and home country what would be the optimal way of organizing economic activity?
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How do institutional differences affect the choice between different modes of serving foreign markets?
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How can we explain the mixed findings regarding the effect of cultural differences on FDI flows?
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Does it matter if we look at financial or operational data? If so, how substantial is the bias when using financial data? Is this country specific?
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How does uncertainty caused by going abroad affect the economic behavior of managers of MNE headquarters versus those of subsidiaries?
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Why do we obtain mixed findings regarding the effect of FDI on economic growth?
In the above projects I am working closely together with Arjen Slangen (University of Amsterdam), Jean Francois Hennart (Tilburg University), Roger Smeets (Groningen) and Remco Zwinkels (Rotterdam), PhilMcCann (Groningen), and Ram Mudambi (Temple U.).
3. Innovation, social capital and institutions
Institutions affect economic behavior, including innovation processes inside firms. Internal institutional structures - in terms of a firm's organizational structure and strategy - are important to understand why some firms are more innovative than others. Following this line of reasoning, I have looked at the role of human resource practices on a firm's innovativeness. But in addition to the internal institutional setting, there are also external institutional pressures affecting a firm's capability to generate new products. Using firm level data from a wide variety of countries I try to improve our understanding of country and region specific institutions and a firm's innovativeness. I am especially interested in doing so from a multi level perspective. That allows me to clearly disentangle firm and aggregate level effects.