My interest in being in academia started while I was a student assistant during about last two years of my bachelor studies at Izmir University of Economics in Turkey – I assisted some professors in the department with their research, gathering data and administrative work. After obtaining two bachelor’s degrees, I moved (kind of out of the blue) to Sweden to study the master program in finance at Lund University. Since I quite liked it here in Sweden, I decided to stay to study for a PhD at, again, Lund University. Throughout my PhD studies, I was more and more convinced by the idea of pursing an academic career. So, this is where I stand now: Finishing my PhD soon and looking for options in academia. Basically, wishing to continue doing the job I love, doing research and teaching... Below, you will find some information about my thesis. In addition, I also devoted quite some time to teaching during my PhD studies. I lectured at master level courses, and very much enjoyed it.

My main research interests include 1) portfolio compositions and investment horizons of large shareholders (and of family owners) and 2) Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). The first two papers in my doctoral thesis investigate the first issue by exploiting a unique, hand-collected ownership data-set on listed Swedish firms. The contribution of the first paper is that I challenge the two assumptions that have been used widely in the family firm literature, and accordingly show that 1) investment horizon of family owners and 2) diversification level of family portfolios matter for corporate investment decisions. The main contribution of the second paper, which has been written together with S. Abraham (Avri) Ravid, is that we for the first time look at agency cost of blockholders by taking their portfolio compositions and investment horizons into account, and we present that these two considerations change the results documented in the literature.

The final two papers are on ERM, and also use unique data, this time, from a risk-management survey conducted for all listed Nordic firms. These papers contribute to the ERM literature by investigating it from a corporate governance perspective, as well as analyzing value creation by ERM with a new data-set. They also contribute by introducing a new sound measure of ERM implementation that could be further developed and used in the ERM literature.