The PhD Odyssey: Rethinking Business Through Research
During the 2025 Graduation Ceremony, doctoral graduates reflect on their journey, reaching beyond the thesis into business and global concerns.
Key points:
1. In 2025, eleven PhD candidates graduated at HEC Paris, and one student graduated from the Research Master’s in Management.
2. They graduated in Strategy & Business Policy, Human Resources & Management, Economics & Decision Sciences, Finance, Marketing, Accounting & Control Management, and Information Systems & Operations Management.
3. Four of the eleven HEC PhD graduates explain their research and its impact.
4. Conferences and the support from the faculty are key to boosting an academic career.
Polarization, Job Markets – and the Carbon Footprint
There are many reasons why candidates choose to pursue academic research beyond their Master's degree. They often share intellectual interests with faculty at their target schools, seek to push the boundaries of knowledge, and aspire to make a positive impact on the world we live in. Here are some of the outstanding approaches by four of the eleven HEC’s latest doctoral graduates.
That’s the case of Yvan Norotte, who had the opportunity to shift from the economics department to marketing to study consumer behavior on social media. He investigated how social media can affect our beliefs and the building of our online relationships, based on the way we interact on the platforms. For example, in the context of polarization and misinformation, he found that the usual techniques that we use in face-to-face interactions are not as efficient as when we interact on social media.
Giacomo Rostagno studies labor economics. He explored how competition among firms affects investment in worker training programs, both by companies and the workers themselves. For example, J.P. Morgan recently prohibited their graduate hires from accepting future-dated jobs with competitors, limiting worker mobility, and, hence, their own incentives to invest in workers. This research has implications for policymakers, inviting them to design incentives, such as non-compete clauses, to boost or reduce investment in human capital. He also pointed to contrasting markets in Europe and the U.S, where mobility is a crucial factor.
Fellow graduate Alina Pugacheva studies the world of accounting to explore how credit analysts affect credit markets and how the workload of credit analysts affects the quality of their job. Her findings help managers to reallocate the credit analysts’ tasks.
Meanwhile, finance alumnus Yurii Handziuk’s three research projects range from the economics of sustainability to applications of AI and machine learning in finance. In a paper that has won the HEC Foundation Faculty Impact Research Award (cosigned by Finance Professor Stefano Lovo), he looked at the most effective and acceptable policies to reduce the carbon footprint of individual consumption. The experiment was conducted at the canteen of HEC, revealing that carbon pricing is almost twice as popular as carbon ban among the HEC student population.
Beforehand, Handziuk had confessed his thoughts on the importance of impactful research: “There are major powers and there is a lot of contributions that don't care at all about the impact and the externalities,” he said in his keynote speech, “so we need to think about the solutions that are not only potentially powerful, but that are also aligning with the incentives of the decision makers who are acting in a way that is beneficial for the overall society.”
In another PhD paper, Handziuk introduced a novel data augmentation technique to address the issue of the lack of financial data to train the modern data-hungry algorithms, underlining his ability to translate theoretical approaches into the realities faced by fellow researchers.
After the speech he gave at the Graduation Ceremony to the 4,000 alumni and families present on the HEC campus, as well as a live global audience, Handziuk confided that his thoughts were constantly with his family and friends back in his native Ukraine. He also said that the regular bombardments prompted him to wonder what sustainability actually means in the modern world.
“Ecosystems are incinerated by the fires of war, children whom we strive to pass the green world are killed. There is a lot of discussion about sustainability and the importance of tackling climate change, which I’m part of. But I think the horrors of war remind us that sustainability and security are not the two alternatives to choose between. Guaranteed peace and security are the necessary conditions for building a sustainable world in which we will all live safely for 15 years or 100 years to come. So one must be very careful when deciding what is a sustainable investment or what are sustainable projects.”
Why pursue a PhD at HEC Paris?
For Rostagno, pursuing a PhD is an opportunity “to look at what you're really interested in and take the time to dig into it and explain all its dimensions”. He underlined the unique nature of this five-year voyage: “It's the only job that gives you this freedom, right?”
Some graduates, like Alina Pugacheva , are also impatient to teach because they believe that “the students too will create value.” She is about to embark on a research and teaching career at Maastricht University as an assistant professor in the Accounting department.
All the PhD graduates interviewed were keen to exchange on their research with other academics and decision makers on the highlights of this journey, which, they believe, will be a premise of their academic future. Generally, PhD students at HEC often point to the strong support from the teaching faculty accompanying them.
Indeed, the school’s Associate Dean of the PhD Program, Johan Hombert, and his academic colleagues make a point of accompanying their budding scholars in obtaining positions in the most prestigious universities, business schools, and institutions.
Sarat Chandra Akella, for instance, will continue research at the Paris School of Economics as a post-doctoral researcher, Maya Jalloul at the Paris School of Business, and Yurii Handziuk will become Assistant Professor of Finance at the Warwick Business School in England. Finally, Xiaoyu Xu is going to the University of Strathclyde. Graduating from HEC’s Finance Department, Hubert Antoine will also impact policies, completing a one-year post-doctoral program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) within the long-run fiscal policy program, before becoming an assistant professor at LSE.
A path to push knowledge boundaries and influence decision makers
For Rostagno, conferences during a PhD journey are key to showing research to decision makers. “Academics present their work to other academics to get feedback, but also to meet people from economic institutions. These are opportunities to influence how policies are designed”, he explained.
From September onwards, he will take this a step further in terms of impact, joining RBB Economics in Brussels as an Associate. RBB is a consulting firm that specializes in competition economics. “That way, I can bring research insights directly into policy discussions.”
Norotte also shared this enthusiasm for conferences: “I would recommend pursuing a PhD at HEC because of the opportunity to present your research at various academic gatherings to meet the community. You meet a lot of people who are very interesting, very interested, working on similar topics, but you also learn from individuals who work on different topics.” He pursued: “This breadth of knowledge and breadth of individual were, for me, the main highlights. Pursuing a PhD is an adventure. It's hard, it's challenging, but it also changes you as a professional and as a person.” He will pursue his career as a post-doctoral researcher in Switzerland.
For Handziuk as well, presenting his research at different universities as part of the job-hunting process was “absolutely galvanizing”. He described his experience: “It's amazing because in the space of three or four weeks you get to travel to five to 10 universities and present your research, meet more than 100 researchers from all around the world, and exchange ideas to receive feedback. You know, this inspires you to work and create new ideas and find new directions for future research.”
Learn more about HEC’s doctoral program here.
Cover photo caption: Graduates of the PhD and the Research Master graduates in Management celebrating at the 2025 Graduation Ceremony on June 13 at the green campus in Jouy-en-Josas. From left to right: Johan Hombert (Dean of the PhD Program), Hao Zhang, Andrew Montandon (Master graduate), Yurii Handziuk, Antoine Hubert, Yvan Norotte, Giacomo Rostagno, and Alina Pugacheva. The PhD graduates not present on the photo are: Zhu Feng, Sarat Chandra Akella, Ho-Wei Hsu, Maya Jalloul, and Xiaoyu Xu. Photo Credits: Eric Tordjman
Céline Bonnet-Laquitaine