Corina Nicoara

Corina Nicoara is a second-year PhD student in Entrepreneurship. During her bachelor’s in business and economics at the University of Bologna in Italy, she became interested in research. After taking on a research internship, she decided that a PhD was right for her and would help her continue developing her ideas in the business and economics fields.

Nicoara’s research interests started out broadly looking at small and new business and evolved to focus on the theme of authenticity which she identified in many such businesses. Her research currently focuses on understanding how authenticity is related to legitimacy and trust. 

Having grown up partly in Moldova and Romania, which were then recently post-communist, Nicoara developed an interest in the idea of businesses being able to make the world more prosperous rather than and in addition to other kinds of institutions. Moving to Italy and having had the opportunity to visit the USA many times, taught her how the differences in cultures and other institutions reverberated in people’s quality of life.  

Nicoara is interested in entrepreneurship research that adds ideas from sociology, psychology and economics to look closer at how the nature of humans as social animals interacts with the market system to create value, economic and not. The theme of authenticity fits in with this idea as both a consequence of good institutions and a characteristic of efficient social exchange and a precursor of trust within social relationships.