Ivana VITANOVA
Associate Professor

Ivana Vitanova - InvEnt, emlyon

 ” Adding a brick in the wall of knowledge. “

Ivana VITANOVA
Associate Professor


I am a corporate finance scholar with a particular interest in behavioral finance.
My research examines the psychological and cognitive traits of entrepreneurs and corporate leaders—such as humility, narcissism, and overconfidence—and their impact on financial performance and stakeholder interactions.
Spanning the full trajectory of a business, from venture creation to failure, my work addresses key topics including early-stage fundraising, managerial compensation, corporate governance, and financial distress.
More recently, I have been exploring gender biases in manager-investor relationships, focusing on their role in early-stage fundraising and later interactions. Methodologically, I employ large-sample econometrics using both primary and secondary data, formal theoretical modeling, and field-data experiments.
At emlyon, I teach corporate finance and startup funding, equipping future professionals with the financial and strategic tools to navigate the business landscape.

ivitanova@em-lyon.com

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Gender Differences in Enterprise Performance During the COVID-19 Crisis: Do Public Policy Responses Matter?<br />

Nurturing overconfidence: The relationship between leader power, overconfidence and firm performance

This paper analyzes the relationship between leader power and overconfidence in the corporate context. Building on psychology research, we postulate that by activating self-serving cognition and illusion of control, the amount of power allocated to the leader of an organization positively influences the probability that he/she will exhibit overconfident beliefs. Using various measures of both formal and symbolic leader power we provide corroborating evidence for such endogeneous – power-based – origin of leader overconfidence. Then, we develop an empirical framework that allows to test the endogeneity-free effects of leader overconfidence on firm performance. Namely, we use a propensity score matching technique to construct a sample of reasonable counterfactuals (i.e., leaders in similar power-allocation conditions who do not exhibit overconfidence). As a result, we provide dissenting evidence about the effects of overconfidence, showing an economically and statistically significant positive influence of overconfidence on firm performance.

Unwrapping opportunity confidence

Unwrapping opportunity confidence: how do differenttypes of feasibility beliefs affect venture emergence?

This study examines whether and how entre-preneurial self-efficacy and low perceived environmen-tal uncertainty—two feasibility beliefs that are assumedto increase the opportunity confidence of nascententrepreneurs—have distinct or similar effects on ven-ture emergence. Analyses of PSED data show that bothbeliefs have a positive indirect effect on venture emer-gence by increasing the effort of nascent entrepreneurs.However, low perceived environmental uncertainty in-duces other more complex and less favorable effects.Overall, our results suggest that the nature of nascententrepreneurs’feasibility beliefs (about the self or aboutthe external environment) affects startup success. Impli-cations for theory and practice are discussed.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Failure Escape: The role of advice seeking in CEOs’ awareness of financial difficulties and corporate restructuring. Journal of Business Research, 175, 114548.

(Achbah, R., Vitanova, I., & Fréchet, M. – 2024)

Self-presentation in entrepreneurial pitches: a review of literature using the dramaturgical approach. Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat/Review of Entrepreneurship, 22(2), 147-177.

(Vitanova, I. – 2023)

CEO overconfidence and corporate tournaments. Managerial and Decision Economics, 43 (5) : 1423–1438 p.

(Vitanova, Ivana. – 2022)