Anne Lafarre

Tilburg Law School at Tilburg University is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for a project on investor stewardship and shareholder engagement . The position sits in the Department of Private, Business & Labour Law and is embedded in the research programme Connecting Responsible Organizations , which focuses on sustainability and technology and connects legal scholarship with empirical and practice-oriented research. The project asks when shareholder engagement makes a difference, for whom, and why. It studies stewardship not as isolated tools, but as a continuous relational process that can move from first contact and private dialogue through escalation and voting. The research will examine how engagement trajectories unfold and what makes them successful from both a beneficiary/client perspective and a broader corporate governance perspective. The work is interdisciplinary and combines conceptual and normative analysis with empirical research. Depending on the candidate’s expertise, methods may include configurational analysis, regression analysis, computational text analysis, coding of engagement communication, interviews, and case studies. The project has close ties to practice, including institutional investors, investor organisations, and policymakers, and aims to generate output relevant to investors, companies, and policymakers. The postdoc will work in a small team with Prof. Anne Lafarre and Prof. Christoph Van der Elst . Tilburg Law School is described as innovative and interdisciplinary, with research links across economics, the behavioural and social sciences, philosophy, history, and digital sciences, and the department’s corporate law and governance research combines doctrinal, law-and-economics, and empirical approaches. The successful candidate will have room to develop their own research ideas within the theme while contributing to international publications and conference presentations.