On June 4, 2019 Eva Erhardt successfully defended her thesis and obtained the doctoral degree. Her dissertation is titled ‘Employment growth of firms: Three empirical investigations into microfinance, high-growth, and institutions based on evidence from Bulgaria’. In three single-authored empirical chapters, she investigated different policy approaches for promoting job creation such as access to finance for small firms or the support of high-growth firms. One chapter of her thesis has already been published in Labour Economics in 2017, another chapter is forthcoming in Small Business Economics.
Eva earned master degrees from the University of Innsbruck, Austria in international economics & management in 2002 and in political sciences in 2004 including a one-year exchange at Tulane University, U.S. After ten years of working experience in the private sector as strategy consultant for Accenture and economist for KfW Development Bank, she returned to academia in 2013 as external Ph.D student at the Chair of Applied Statistics and Econometrics of the University of Mainz. Since 2018 she is also teaching at Universities of Applied Sciences. In September 2019 she will take over a new position as interim professor for international business and quantitative methods at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf (HSD). She lives in Essen with her husband and three children.
