New employees at CEnSE

Emma Lappi and Helena Nilsson are excited to be part of the faculty at Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics

Emma Lappi defended her thesis entitled “Post-Entrepreneurship Experience” at Jönköping International Business School on 5 June 2020. The faculty opponent was Associate Professor Jolanda Hessels from Rotterdam University. Emma’s thesis concerns questions related to individual and firm-level productivity outcomes of earlier entrepreneurship experience. Her research interests lie in applied industrial organization and labour economics with a focus on entrepreneurship, labour mobility, and productivity. So far her research has been published in Small Business Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, and Empirica.

Emma started at CEnSE as a post-doctoral researcher September 1, 2020. The position includes 20-percent of teaching activities and 80-percent research within the core areas of CEnSE. Her research plan for the upcoming years involves issues related to, for example, housing, productivity spillovers of new hires across skill dimensions, the wellbeing associated with labour mobility, and the role of human capital for firms in times of crisis. Most of the projects have a specific focus on entrepreneurship and/or urban economics. Emma will be working with colleagues at CEnSE as well as in international and national collaborations. These include Sander Ramboer at VATT Institute for Economic Research, Assistant Professor Lorenz Fisher at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, and Professor Pontus Braunerhjelm at the Royal Institute of Technology.

Helena Nilsson completed her masters’ degree in Economics at the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University in 2012. She continued to work as a research assistant at the Institute of Retail Economics (previously HUI Research), an economics consultancy firm and a research institute specializing in analyses related to retail trade. Being a research assistant at HUI Research spurred her interest in the economics of retail location. She applied to the doctoral program in Economics at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) since it offers a prominent research environment for doing research on retail location in a regional economics context. In 2015, Helena enrolled in the doctoral program and in May 2020 she successfully defended her dissertation titled “Spatial Organization of Retail Activities”. Her thesis consists of four chapters, each of which analyzes the effects from and determinants of retail location, on the municipal, neighbourhood, and firm level. In the first two chapters, the effects from IKEA entry on retail sales and employment are analyzed, first on the municipality level and second at the firm level. The third chapter assesses how entry of an externally located shopping mall is associated with firm exits in different retail subsectors. In the final paper, the relationship between food store location and neighbourhood population density is examined. Apart from working on her dissertation, Helena has been involved in research on career paths within the retail and wholesale sectors and has taught courses at the bachelor and master level.

As of 1 September 2020, Helena started a two year contract as a post-doctoral researcher at CEnSE. During this period, she will study how changes in the urban environment influence activities that are dependent on spatial proximity to consumers. More specifically, Helena will examine the effects of closing off streets for cars on firms in the retail and hospitality sectors. She will examine how these types of changes affect the local firms’ employment and sales and how they affect the local composition of firms, in terms of size and sub-sector composition.