Professor Gerhard Kling holds a Chair in Finance at the University of Aberdeen. Before joining Aberdeen, he was a Professor of International Business and Management at SOAS University of London, a Professor of Finance at the University of Southampton and held academic posts in Strategy and Finance at UWE and Utrecht University. His research focuses on corporate governance (including agency theory, social networks, and elites) and firm growth (including mergers and acquisitions, market-entry, and diversification) with a particular interest in the application of quantitative methods (panel data estimation, time series analysis and Bayesian statistics) to analysing the role of time and path dependence and decision making. His interest in philanthropy lies in understanding actors’ motives and underlying drivers. Why do some actors and not others decide to engage? Are they driven by altruism or are other motives involved? How do social networks respond to ‘acts of generosity’?
