dr. SJA (Jolanda) Hessels

Biography

Jolanda Hessels is associate professor at Erasmus School of Economics. She is a research fellow of the Tinbergen Institute (since 2009) and also a member of the Erasmus Research Institute in Management (since 2008).

Jolanda serves as head of the Strategy Economics group (since 2023) and Deputy Director of the Department of Applied Economics (since 2025). She is the academic director of the Strategy Economics MSc programme in Economics and Business (since 2018). She contributes / has contributed to several internal committees and working groups.

Jolanda’s main research area is economics of entrepreneurship and innovation, focusing on human capital, labour markets and institutions. Her research has received over 12,000 citations based on Google scholar and her H-index is 32.

In current projects Jolanda looks into how previous careers and the hiring strategies of entrepreneurs relate to startup performance and employee compensation. She also does research on the role of peer effects for individual entrepreneurs' entry decisions. In other ongoing research Jolanda studies the impact of carbon taxes on the decarbonization of firms.

Jolanda is an Editor at the journal Small Business Economics (since 2017); Article Influence Score 2024: 1.8. 

Additional roles:

• Scientific Member Advisory Board of the Startup panel of the ZEW in Mannheim, advising mainly on new research directions and on strategies to increase usage of the panel (since 2024).
• Member Advisory Board of the MSc Small Business & Entrepreneurship programme of the University of Groningen, advising mainly on future-proof education for labour market needs (since 2025).