About

Prof. Dr. Christian Hopp is the head of the institute for Applied Data Science and Finance at BFH. He has carried out numerous research projects in empirical research in general, and entrepreneurial and leadership, in particular. His work has been carried out using large-scale datasets, scraped datasets, and multi-level combinations of archival and public data. The Wirtschaftswoche ranks him as one the Top 10 researchers in Switzerland in terms of academic output. He currently leads two SNF projects (around 1Mio. CHF funding) on social and entrepreneurial finance, as well as on CEO succession and their impact on sustainability and firm performance. He also has been awarded an SNF EU-Cost Grant (3 years, 300k, with Jörg Osterrieder). Much of his scholarly effort in the past 15 years focusses on the empirical analyses of entrepreneurship, leadership, and innovation management. His work has documented hiring biases in large-scale recruitment processes for management positions and has studied hiring decisions in the context of family and non-family firms. Other work has studied leadership skill development in adolescents and the relationships between leadership and later-life earnings. While the early years have been marked by large-scale quantitative analyses of different data, the recent years have been characterized by novel techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze large text-corpora and web-scraped data. Given the associated causality problems with using very large datasets, he has also branched into experimental techniques and employ more mixed methods-oriented studies. Very many projects have focused on multi-method inquiries ranging from qualitative to quantitative data analysis, which resonates well with this project. As such, the work is strongly embedded into recent methodological advancements in data collection, replication, pre-registration, and data analysis. Very many of the data used for these studies, has been collected from non-public sources, which makes these contributions very pertinent for this proposal. Both, the research focus and network, position him exceptionally well for building bridges and transferring knowledge between academic fields, both in theory and but also in terms of methodological contributions Lately, he also engaged in other work that studies the role of open science and open data policies to advance scientific inquiry (with G. Barczak, J. Kaminski, G. Pruschak, and F. Piller); which might also assist in aligning this project with recent advances in open science and science communication. Christian Hopp has recently (May 2023) collaborated with Bettina S. Wiese and Anna Stertz on an SNF Spark Application “Fathers’ parental leave as an inflection point for revisiting career intentions.”