Bettina Müller studied economics, Italian, and German literature at the University of Konstanz, where she earned her doctorate with a thesis on the relationship of founding team composition on the success of young companies. During and after her doctoral studies, she worked at the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany, in the areas of digital economy, innovation economics, and business dynamics, most recently as a senior researcher.
In addition to her research, she was a lecturer for entrepreneurship at the University of Birmingham and a lecturer for quantitative methods at Pforzheim University. Since 2018, she has been a research assistant at the Institute for Small Business Research at the University of Mannheim and, since 2026, also at the Technical University of Berlin in the department of organizational, labor, and economic sociology.
In the Collaborative Research Center “Structural Change Property,” Bettina Müller is involved in the project “Embracing Capital: Normative and Corporate Law Aspects of the Capitalization of Company Ownership.” In this project, she uses large data sets to analyze how the choice of corporate legal forms—and thus also the ownership structure of companies—has changed over time. A particular focus is on the GmbH (limited liability company). This legal form has been relatively little studied in research to date, even though it is the oldest form of corporation in Germany and enables a high concentration of ownership, for example through holding structures.
Research interests
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Entrepreneurship and self-employment
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Firm dynamics and innovation
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Ownership of companies
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Applied econometrics
