Business Administration and Finance
Since March 2000, I, born in 1966, have been a Professor of Business Administration, particularly Corporate Finance, at RWTH Aachen, one of Germany's leading technical universities. Previously, from October 1995 to February 2000, I held a chair in Business Administration at the University of Bonn following Professor Horst Albach. I obtained my doctorate in 1993 at the University of Cologne in Economics, where I also earned the Venia legendi for Business Administration in 1995. After completing my studies in Business Administration in 1989 with a degree as Dipl.-Kfm., I initially worked until the end of 1990 at McKinsey & Co., Inc., as a management consultant before becoming a research assistent at Professor Herbert Hax's chair in Cologne in 1991.
Currently, my oeuvre includes ten books, approximately 90 book contributions, and nearly 100 articles in national and international academic journals. Additionally, I have authored around 60 essays in economic journals on higher education. Since 2020, I have been the chief editor of the 'Journal of Business Economics,' formerly known as 'Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft,' where I also served as Department Editor since 2007. In 2024, I was elected president of the German Finance Association for the year 2025.
My interests in the field of finance, i.e., the procurement and use of monetary resources specifically within the context of business decisions, are diverse. My current research focuses particularly on Digital Finance, which involves the implications of increasing digitalization of processes in corporate finance, and Sustainable Finance, which considers sustainability aspects in finance. In this latter context, I have also addressed gender issues.
For example, differences in investment behavior between men and women are demonstrable (cf. Breuer/Renerken/Salzmann, 2022). Gender also influences the perception of CEOs' trust rhetoric (cf. Breuer/Knetsch/Salzmann, 2023) as well as the interaction between male and female bankruptcy judges and the CEOs affected by bankruptcy (cf. Breuer/Mersmann, 2024). In general, all these areas offer numerous points of connection for further research projects, which I am currently working to specify. For instance, studies by Breuer/Mersmann (2024) have shown that female and male bankruptcy judges each prefer CEOs of their own gender, likely due to a similarity bias, possibly reinforced by references to gender stereotypes. The similarity bias suggests that people tend to favor individuals who are similar to themselves. Thus, men promote men while women support women. This effect can be overshadowed by gender stereotypes that attribute a greater ability to handle crisis situations to men than to women. Since there are significantly more male judges than female in the examined U.S. sample, the similarity bias alone leads to a structural disadvantage for women in bankruptcy proceedings. Gender stereotypes held by judges of both genders further amplify this effect. As a possible continuation of these studies, investigating the role of diverse boards in bankruptcy proceedings remains pending. A closer examination of the so-called Glass Cliff hypothesis—according to which women specifically attain leadership positions in crisis situations—could also be interesting. Breuer/Mersmann (2024) found no indications for this in their dataset; however, an additional consideration of the networks of female and male CEOs could generate more nuanced insights.
Breuer, W./Renerken, T./Salzmann, A.J. (2022): Measuring risk-taking and patience in financial decision making, Review of Financial Economics, Vol. 40, S. 97-114. https://doi.org/10.1002/rfe.1142
Breuer, W./Knetsch, A./Salzmann, A. J. (2023): Trust rhetoric and CEO gender, Review of Financial Economics, Vol. 41, S. 322-344. https://doi.org/10.1002/rfe.1181
Breuer, W./Mersmann, K. (2024): A primer on Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings: why the genders of the CEO and judge (may) matter, European Journal of Finance. https://doi.org/10.1080/1351847X.2024.2415438
Websitelink to my Publications
Cultural Finance, Digital Finance, Gender Finance, Sustainable Finance.
