Problems my research works on

A research programme told through problems, mechanisms and evidence. Each story starts from a real-world decision, then links the published and accepted work that helps explain it.

Background: 40,529 observations across 41 countries, from the accepted culture-cognition paper. The image is illustrative and does not plot the data.

Who decides whether an entrepreneur's claim is believable?

Any venture can say it uses AI. Any founder can post about their struggles. Both claims cost almost nothing to make, so classical signalling theory says they should carry no information. Yet audiences act on them.

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A presenter on stage in a dark hall in front of a large bright screen, with the audience in silhouette

Why do entrepreneurs from one country make opposite choices?

Take two entrepreneurs in one country, sector and regulatory regime. One takes the venture abroad and the other never leaves home. Country-level explanations cannot tell you which will do which.

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Aerial view of a market square filled with rows of red, white and green stall roofs

Who gets the chance to take part in entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship policy often assumes that once a market, platform or support scheme exists, people will use it. The published evidence is less encouraging. Gender, geography, family expectations, finance, access to technology and institutional voids decide who can act on an opportunity in the first place.

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Three women in an office talking over a laptop and notebook

How firms leave foreign markets and come back

Entrepreneurial firms are pulling out of foreign markets at a rate not seen in two decades. Almost all of it is reported as failure.

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A container port at dusk, lit in orange, with cranes and stacked containers

Photographs by Teemu Paananen, paws and prints, Iwaria Inc. and Timelab, via Unsplash.

Research should travel beyond the reference list.

A publication list tells you what has been published. It does not show the larger problem those papers are trying to solve, and it asks a reader to reconstruct the argument alone.

Each story begins with a problem an entrepreneur, policymaker or executive would recognise, states the mechanism that explains it, links the peer-reviewed evidence behind it, and closes with what follows for practice and what remains unresolved.

The formal record is kept separately →